Tariq Ali

"I spoke that afternoon of the struggle in Pakistan, but I went further and warned them that their demands for regional autonomy would never be conceded by the army. ‘Rather than grant you that, they will crush you. The only serious option is independence. A Red Bengal could become the Yenan of our subcontinent.’ These ideas had never been stated in this form in public and I felt the excitement of the audience. Even the Awami League students were stunned. Was I not after all a Punjabi? How could I talk in this fashion? But they recovered soon and cheered me till they were hoarse. Afterwards I was mobbed and the one question everyone wanted to discuss was how they could achieve their goal. If, at that stage, the political leaders had realized the holocaust that was to follow they could have politically armed their supporters and prepared them for the inevitable civil war. When I left Dhaka hundreds of students came to say farewell with clenched fists and cries of ‘Lal salaam!’ (‘Red salute’) and invitations to come back, but live in Dhaka."

"I did, however, wonder aloud as to why it was that those who treated the Quran as a divine monopoly in Pakistan, the Jamaat-i-Islami, were also on the payroll of the American embassy. This led to a loud roar of approval and chants of ‘Death to the hired mercenaries’, etc."

"What accounts, then, for his elevation to a cult figure?"

"One could add that the manufactured love for Churchill, and the uses made of him, came to embody the nostalgia for an Empire that was long gone."

"... importance of the Falklands conflict in re-launching Churchill."

"One of the worst criminals Europe ever produced was Leopold of Belgium, whose ownership of and brutalities in the Congo led to the deaths of several million Africans."

"[On the Bengal famine of 1943] Three important books that have broken the wall of silence are Mike Davis' pathbreaking study Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the making of the Third World and works exclusively on the famine by two North America-based Bengali scholars, Janam Mukherjee and Madhusree Mukerjee. There are also innumerable articles, such that the picture we now have is virtually complete. What exactly happened?"

"Mukherjee's account makes absolutely clear that, in order to protect the (British) Raj from a Japanese threat that never materialized, the British state sacrificed the lives of some 5 million people. The war cabinet maintained an attitude of callous indifference. In Churchill's case, the indifference was strongly tinged with racism."

"The Bengal famine was no natural disaster but 'the direct product of colonial and wartime ideologies and calculations that knowingly exposed the poor of Bengal to annihilation through deprivation'; 'a grievous crime was committed in broad daylight', one that is still unacknowledged."