As India reels from the Covid pandemic, is it wrong to ask whether independent India is really taking better care of Indians than the British Raj did? This question—yes, provocative—isn’t one that Roderick Matthews poses in “Peace, Poverty and Betrayal,” a book he describes as “a new history of British India.” But many of his readers could be tempted to ask it as they observe present-day Indians die in the thousands from a lack of hospital beds, medicines and oxygen—dying, in fact, from the sort of callous and conspicuous dereliction of care that we’ve been schooled to ascribe to colonial rulers.
The pandemic is a global phenomenon, but its management within India is the job of the Indian government. In this task, alas, it appears to have fallen as scandalously short of the standards required of it as the British Raj did in 1943, when a famine killed millions in Bengal. This deadly neglect came about, in part, because the war cabinet in London, Mr. Matthews writes, “had no wish to divert ships and food from elsewhere to help relieve the distress.”
