(EDITORIAL) The Statesman has rendered a public service by publishing photographs of Indians destitute and dying in the streets of Calcutta, and we respect our contemporary all the more for utilizing a privileged position for a cause which, if similarly handled and illustrated by Indian journals, might have been suspected of unfriendliness and treated accordingly. We will, however, point out that if a fleet of camera-men were detailed to cover the whole country, pictures could be got to produce albums bursting with ghastly testimony of the famine stalking the land.

… Some … observers say that the famine in India is man-made: there is no doubt that it is war-made, and the potentialities of hungry upheavals on the surface have come through the drain caused by the war, and chronic skeletons have been churned up to the surface to form the drift of corpses that amazes I.C.S gentlemen shuffled about to solve the food-problem in the light of Gen. Wood’s assurance that there was “enough to go round” … We are entirely against the temptation in some quarters of making the anguish of the people as a sport and pawn of party politics. We should, at this crisis, hold together … The spirit of sharing among the civilian population can however work only under an administration run by Indians in concert….

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2018