Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

For instance, the U.S. gave very little aid to India. In fact, sometimes it was absolutely scandalous—like, right after Indian independence, in around 1950, India had its last massive famine (under the British there were famines all the time), and while there aren’t very good statistics, probably something on the order of maybe 13 to 15 million people died from starvation. Well, we have the U.S. internal records from that period, and at first there wasn’t even any question of giving them aid—I mean, we had food coming out our ears, just huge food surpluses, but there was no aid going to India because we did not like Nehru’s independence and his moves towards non-alignment and neutrality. But then there was a discussion about whether the U.S. should give India food aid as a weapon—that is, we give them some food aid as a way of forcing them to accept U.S. policies on various issues. And after that, a little bit of aid was trickled out—but it was delayed and conditioned on India’s accepting American positions on things like the Korean War and so on. Nobody knows exactly how many millions of people died because of that.109