Adamant wrote on May 26
th, 2014 at 7:42pm:
Islam slaughtered an estimated 80 million Hindus over 500 years...
That is a big claim not really supported by evidence isn't it.
What we do know is that the Christian British occupation starved millions of Indians to death.
The British forcibly converted Indian land to cash crops, and took much of the remaining food crops back to England even in times of famine.
Quote:Famines in India resulted in more than 60 million deaths over the course of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries...
...The late 18th and 19th centuries saw increase in the incidence of severe famine. These famines in British India were bad enough to have a remarkable impact on the long term population growth of the country, especially in the half century between 1871–1921. The first, the Bengal famine of 1770, is estimated to have taken the lives of nearly one-third of the population of the region—about 10 million people...
...The 1901 Famine Commission found that twelve famines and four "severe scarcities" took place between 1765 and 1858...
...Amartya Sen implies that the famines in the British era were due to a lack of a serious effort on the part of the British government to prevent famines. He links the lack of this serious effort to the absence of democracy in British India. The father of India's green revolution M. S. Swaminathan credits the elimination of famines to Indian independence from the Britain despite the trebling of population.
...Mike Davis regards the famines of the 1870s and 1890s as 'Late Victorian Holocausts'. This negative image of British rule is common in India. Davis argues that "Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered ... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill."...
...Causes[The famines were a product both of uneven rainfall and British economic and administrative policies. Colonial polices implicated include rack-renting, levies for war, free trade policies, the expansion of export agriculture, and neglect of agricultural investment. Indian exports of opium, rice, wheat, indigo, jute, and cotton were a key component of the economy of the British empire, generating vital foreign currency, primarily from China, and stabilising low prices in the British grain market. Export crops displaced millions of acres that could have been used for domestic subsistence, and increased the vulnerability of Indians to food crises...
...The first major famine that took place under British rule was the Bengal Famine of 1770. About a quarter to a third of the population of Bengal starved to death in about a ten-month period. East India Company's raising of taxes disastrously coincided with this famine and exacerbated it...
...n 1874 the response from the British authorities was better and famine was completely averted. Then in 1876 a huge famine broke out in Madras. Lord Lytton's administration believed that 'market forces alone would suffice to feed the starving Indians.' The results of such thinking proved fatal (some 5.5 million starved)...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/India-famine-family-crop-420....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India#British_rule
List of major famines during Christian British occupation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_r... Quote:How Churchill 'starved' India
...Some three million Indians died in the famine of 1943...
...The scarcity, Mukherjee writes, was caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain - India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for a full year. Mr Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India citing a shortage of ships - this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe...
...Throughout the autumn of 1943, the United Kingdom's food and raw materials stockpile for its 47 million people - 14 million fewer than that of Bengal - swelled to 18.5m tonnes...
...Mr Churchill also pushed a scorched earth policy - which went by the sinister name of Denial Policy - in coastal Bengal where the colonisers feared the Japanese would land. So authorities removed boats (the lifeline of the region) and the police destroyed and seized rice stocks...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10/how_churchill_starved_india.html
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