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Posted By admin on September 6, 2022

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The Sir Winston Churchill Society of Calgary, in partnership with the Alberta government, is going to unveil a statue of the former British prime minister in downtown Calgary.

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Premier Jason Kenney remembered Churchill as the greatest defender of democracy in the 20th century and in his view, the centurys single greatest leader.

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The Indian diaspora in Canada has contributed notably to the progress of this great country. The present House of Commons has 19 members of Parliament of Indian origin, out of 338 seats. Punjabi, Hindi and Gujarati are major languages spoken in Canada today and Punjabi stands at No. 3 in Calgary only.

The diaspora is not very happy with the decision to erect a statue of Churchill, though this is not coming from the taxpayers money.

As Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign for peaceful resistance, Churchill said he ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back. On the citizens of India: They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.

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In the West, Churchill is a freedom fighter, the man who grimly withstood Nazism and helped save western liberal democracy, wrote Ishaan Tharoor for the Washington Post. Its a civilizational legacy that has been polished and placed on a mantle for decades. Churchill launched the lifeboats, declared Time magazine, on the cover of its Jan. 2, 1950, issue that hailed the British leader as the man of the half-century.

But theres another side to Churchills political career that should not be forgotten amid endless eulogies. To many outside the West, he remains a grotesque racist and a stubborn imperialist, forever on the wrong side of history.

He referredto Palestinians as barbaric hordeswho ate little but camel dung. When quashing insurgents in Sudan in the earlier days of his imperial career, Churchill boasted of killing three savages.

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Churchill despised the Indian independence movement and its leader, Gandhi, whom he described as half-naked and labelled a seditious fakir.

As Indian writer Pankaj Mishra explains in the New Yorker, Churchill was one of a coterie of imperial rulers who worked to create sectarian fissures within Indias independence movement between Indian Hindus and Muslims, which led to the brutal partition of India when the former colony finally did win its freedom in 1947. Millions died or were displaced in an orgy of bloodshed that still echoes in the regions tense politics to this day.

Madhushree Mukerjee, a journalist, argued the Bengal famine of 1943 was exacerbated by the decisions of Churchills war cabinet in London. She writes that rice stocks continued to leave India even as London was denying urgent requests from Indias viceroy for more than one million tonnes of emergency wheat supplies in 1942-43. Churchill has been quoted as blaming the famine on the fact Indians were breeding like rabbits, and asking how, if the shortages were so bad, Gandhi was still alive.

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However, Zareer Masani in his article, Churchill and the Bengal Famine, writes that much of the case against Churchill rests not on his actions, but on his words; namely his racist comments about Indians, and Bengalis in particular.

He says the actual evidence shows that Churchill believed, based on information he had been getting that there was no food supply shortage in Bengal, but a demand problem caused by local mismanagement of the distribution system, mostly because of wartime supply constraints and shaky relations between the Muslim-led coalition government of Bengal and its Hindu grain merchants.

When the severity of the famine, which killed millions, was discovered, Churchill and his war cabinet took action, said Masani.

However, the accusation of neglect and even genocide during the famine persists to this day.

To many in the diaspora, Churchill was not either the greatest defender of democracy in the 20th century or the centurys single greatest leader.

The Sir Winston Churchill Society has every right to erect a statue and the people from South Asia have every right not to welcome it.

Rishi Nagar is the news director at Red FM 106.7 in Calgary, a member of the Calgary Police Services Anti-Racism Committee and a member of the senate of the University of Calgary.

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Nagar: For most of the Indian diaspora in Calgary, Churchill is not worthy of a statue - Calgary Herald

Category: Diaspora
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