The Ghosts of Bengal Famine Haunt Gaza Today. Why Are We Still Turning Away?

Without acknowledging that Gaza’s famine is political, without calling out the genocide as "genocide", words carry no weight.

(Photo: PTI)

For the first time in history, we are witnessing people forced to choose between death and food. Death is macabre, but Gaza shows us that hunger can be even more merciless. Otherwise, no one would risk approaching an aid centre, fully aware they might be killed there.

Ten-year-old Yazan al‑Kafarneh died of starvation at Mohammed Yousef El‑Najar Hospital in Rafah. Born with cerebral palsy, Yazan needed soft, nutrient-rich foods, a diet that became impossible during Gaza’s blockade. 

In photographs shared widely, his skeletal frame can be seen laying beneath a transparent IV drip, skin tightly stretched over bone, and hollow cheeks deeply sunken.

He survived bombardment only to succumb to hunger.

In Gaza, children chew sand and grass to keep the hunger away, only to fall lifeless before help arrives. Mothers collapse from starvation, and elders die waiting for bread. The streets reek of death, hospitals have no food, no medicine, no light. Families huddle in rubble as drones circle overhead and hunger kills them as surely as bombs.

The official death toll in Gaza has crossed 60,000. A classroom with 25 children is vanishing daily. According to the United Nations, hundreds have died from forced starvation, and the majority of Gazans are now in IPC Phase 5 (catastrophic food insecurity).

Weaponisation of Hunger

Gaza is not the first place where a colonising force has used starvation as a weapon of genocide. But it is the only place where that starvation has been broadcast live, in real time, for the world to see. And yet, humanity watched and failed to act.

During my Master’s term at AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, I was moved to tears when our photography teacher, Sohail Akbar, showed us Sunil Janah’s black-and-white photos of emaciated children with sunken eyes, dying on the streets of undivided India during the Bengal Famine.

Those haunting frames captured the agony of acute starvation and documented a colonial apathy that cost millions of Indian lives.

Image of the Bengal famine taken by Willoughby Wallace Hooper.

Image of the Bengal famine taken by Willoughby Wallace Hooper.

Image of the Bengal famine taken by Willoughby Wallace Hooper.

The Bengal Famine of 1943 wasn't a natural disaster. It was also a deliberate act of starvation by the British Empire, killing an estimated three million Indians.

As millions starved, Winston Churchill's government prioritised war efforts, exporting vital grain and destroying local food supplies, turning Bengal into a calculated death trap.

Today, as images from Gaza reveal children gnawing on scraps and drinking polluted water, it is hard not to recall those haunting frames. For nations that once endured such suffering, the silence or restraint in the face of a similar cruelty unfolding elsewhere is not merely unsettling. It is a quiet forgetting of history.

How can anyone eat without guilt, knowing that elsewhere, children are forced to swallow sand just to silence their hunger? How can anyone sleep peacefully, knowing that somewhere, bedtime stories have been replaced by the scream of missiles?

Dismissing a petition to protest in solidarity with Gaza at Azad Maidan, the Bombay High Court recently remarked, "Be patriots... speak up for the causes in our own country."

But, I believe, the greatest Indian patriot is someone who feels empathy for any colonised people in the world and advocates for their liberation through non-violent means. Remember what Mahatma Gandhi said, 'Forced Zionist settlement is a crime against humanity."

India-Palestine Friendship

India has stood with Palestine on a majority of international platforms where the world has shown solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In 1947, it was among the few countries that openly called for an independent Palestinian state, defying the interests of post-war Western allies, and voted against the partition of Palestine.

In 1975, it recognised the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the official representative of the Palestinian people. In 1988, Indian was the first non-Arab country to recognise the statehood of Palestine, and a decade later, it opened a Representative Office in Ramallah.

In 2004, during a tense and pivotal period in Palestine, India’s then Minister of State for External Affairs, E Ahamed, travelled to meet Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The visit came at a time when Palestine was under siege, and Ahamed’s presence carried both diplomatic weight and symbolic solidarity.

What makes the visit particularly memorable is the press interview that followed, still archived on the Indian government’s official website. Two decades later, his words read with an almost haunting relevance.

When asked about his personal impressions of the situation on the ground, Ahamed said, “Horrible, just terrible. In Hebron, I personally saw Israeli security forces harassing Palestinians who were simply trying to move from one place to another.”

In 2007, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, Ahamed said, “For India, the commitment to the Palestinian cause has been a bedrock of its foreign policy since even before our independence. India’s solidarity with the Palestinian people and its position on the Palestinian question were inspired by our own freedom struggle, led by Mahatma Gandhi.”

In 2011, Ahamed reaffirmed India’s unwavering support for Palestine at the UNSC open debate and said, “The call of the international community for democracy and respect for fundamental rights will ring hollow if the current impasse continues and Palestinians are denied their aspirations.”

A Change In Diplomacy?

I do not believe that India’s diplomatic position on Palestine has shifted with the change of parties at the Centre. The recent statement by India’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Parvathaneni Harish, stands as clear testimony to this continuity.

“Let us not be content with paper solutions, but strive to achieve practical solutions that make a tangible difference in the daily lives of our Palestinian brothers and sisters,” he said. He also reminded the assembly that India was among the first nations to recognise the two-state solution, doing so as early as 1988.

“Neither party should feel insecure. A sovereign, viable, and independent State of Palestine, within recognised and mutually agreed borders, living side by side with Israel in peace and security, is a prerequisite for enduring peace and sustainable development,”

Ambassador Parvathaneni Harish

If India’s diplomatic position has not changed, then what has? Why do many now believe that India supports Israel? This perception is the result of a shift in India’s political position, a deviation from its earlier approach that has altered how its position is understood both at home and abroad.

For Indian politics, Palestine is not merely a land where genocide is unfolding. It has become a political tool, wielded for electoral gains. The arrests of protesters supporting the Palestinian cause, and the detention of individuals involved in BDS boycott campaigns and the recruitment drive to the Israeli military are some of the examples of this politicisation.

This posture stems from the unchecked Islamophobia that continues to pervade the country. Fed by an algorithm-driven torrent of right-wing propaganda, many citizens turn a blind eye to the starvation in Gaza, withholding even basic empathy from its people.

Adding to this is a distorted notion of patriotism, where calling for human rights in another country is framed as a sign of diminished national loyalty. This is no coincidence; it is part of a deliberate attempt to redefine patriotism itself.

A long-term study tracking how this idea has shifted over the years could shed light on how even core national values are moulded to suit the political positions of mainstream parties.

But the real crisis emerges when these political positions begin to distort the country’s diplomatic position. India’s recent voting pattern at the United Nations reflects this troubling shift.

Over the past few years, India has abstained from a number of resolutions concerning Palestine, including those calling for a ceasefire. Given India’s longstanding foreign policy and the reasoning articulated by its ambassador to the UN, such abstentions on ceasefire resolutions would have once seemed unthinkable.

Yet, India’s diplomatic stance still remains committed to safeguarding human rights and liberating colonised people.

In his 1938 essay published in Harijan magazine, Gandhi made India’s position clear: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs.” 

Despite his sympathy for the Jewish community, which had been banished from various European countries, he supported the Palestinian cause, aligning himself with its anti‑colonial struggle.

For a nation born of anti‑colonial struggle, our diplomacy should not forget what we once endured. More than 10,000 children are now dying in Gaza, not only from bombs, but also from hunger.

The international community watches; UN officials describe scenes of civilians being shot while queuing for food, and hospitals diagnosing crying babies who are too weak to cry. We are not powerless. India has sent humanitarian aid and called for access.

These are necessary but not enough. Without acknowledging that Gaza’s famine is political, without calling out the genocide as "genocide", words carry no weight.

India does not need to abandon its diplomatic ties with Israel. But if we stand for the oppressed, our words must reflect it. History remembers not the diplomacy of convenience, but the courage of moral clarity. When hunger is used as a weapon, silence is its accomplice.

(Mohammed Ramees an independent journalist and media research student at Doha Institute of Graduate Studies, Qatar. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)