"More recent studies, have argued the famine was exacerbated by the decisions of Winston Churchill’s wartime Cabinet in London. The Cabinet was warned repeatedly that the exhaustive use of Indian resources for the war effort could result in famine, but it opted to continue exporting rice from India to elsewhere in the empire. Rice stocks continued to leave India even as London was denying urgent requests from India’s viceroy for more 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, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive."
"in 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused – as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved – by the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits”.
"When requisitioning policies caused famine in Bengal in 1943, his refusal to comply with the viceroy of India Lord Wavell’s requests for emergency grain shipments were not the mark of a uniquely villainous soul; other British politicians might have acted similarly in his place. That said, many officials, including his own India secretary, Leo Amery, an arch-imperialist who crushed wartime Indian anti-colonial rebellion ruthlessly, found Churchill’s racist defenses of his decision — that Indians breed like rabbits, that if the famine was so bad why was Gandhi still alive, that the starvation of Bengalis mattered less than starvation of “sturdy” Greeks — remarkable. "