Is this true? Churchill deliberately starved 4 million Indians in 1942-43?

From http://www.tehelka.com/remembering-indias-forgotten-holocaust/

An excerpt from the website linked above:

Quote :

... Australian biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade holocaust” because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for the disaster. Bengal had a bountiful harvest in 1942, but the British started diverting vast quantities of food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food shortage in the areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Bangladesh.

Author Madhusree Mukerjee tracked down some of the survivors and paints a chilling picture of the effects of hunger and deprivation. In Churchill’s Secret War, she writes: “Parents dumped their starving children into rivers and wells. Many took their lives by throwing themselves in front of trains. Starving people begged for the starchy water in which rice had been boiled. Children ate leaves and vines, yam stems and grass. People were too weak even to cremate their loved ones.”

“No one had the strength to perform rites,” a survivor tells Mukerjee. “Dogs and jackals feasted on piles of dead bodies in Bengal’s villages.” The ones who got away were men who migrated to Calcutta for jobs and women who turned to prostitution to feed their families. “Mothers had turned into murderers, village belles into whores, fathers into traffickers of daughters,” writes Mukerjee.

Mani Bhaumik, the first to get a PhD from the IITs and whose invention of excimer surgery enabled Lasik eye surgery, has the famine etched in his memory. His grandmother starved to death because she used to give him a portion of her food.

By 1943 hordes of starving people were flooding into Calcutta, most dying on the streets. The sight of well-fed white British soldiers amidst this apocalyptic landscape was “the final judgement on British rule in India”, said the Anglophile Jawaharlal Nehru.

Churchill could easily have prevented the famine. Even a few shipments of food grain would have helped, but the British prime minister adamantly turned down appeals from two successive Viceroys, his own Secretary of State for India and even the President of the US .

I hadn't heard of this so I did a little digging. It's possible the Churchill connection might be overdone. If the link below is accurate there were several factors, human greed being the most critical.

https://suite.io/david-myers/3zq623p

I read a few other articles and this one seems most plausible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943

Quote :

... The democratically elected Provincial governments, their public servants and some key people in the Indian civil service believed, or said they believed, that Bengal had plenty of food, which could be made available with good administration. There were no meaningful production statistics which could support this, and those ‘hopelessly defective’ production statistics that did exist indicated a serious shortage.

There were claims that hoarding was the cause of the famine, and this should be dealt with administratively, not by providing starving people in Bengal with food. ‘And at the Third Food Conference in Delhi on the 5 to 8 July, … the suggestion that “the only reason why people are starving in Bengal is that there is hoarding” was greeted at the Conference by the other Provinces with applause.’[47] Similarly, some officials in the Government of India refused to accept the evidence on the ground, preferring their own idiosyncratic interpretations of the market: as late as November 1943, ‘The Government of India would admit no intrinsic shortage in Bengal in the Spring of 1943 and, even in November, at the height of the famine, the Director-General of Food in the Council of State said that “the major trouble in Bengal has been not so much an intrinsic shortage of essential food grains as a breakdown of public confidence.’[48] On 19 October 1943, when the famine was at its peak, Wavell noted in his journal “On the food situation Linlithgow [The outgoing Viceroy] says chief factor morale.[i.e. panic hoarding]”[49] For hoarding to have created the amount of hunger and death recorded if there had, indeed, been adequate supplies, it would have been necessary that the richest 10% of Bengal's population, the only ones who could afford it, to lay in two years' rice supply for themselves, in addition to the stocks accumulated in the previous two years, and to keep it in stock until the end of the war, while their neighbours starved. There was never any suggestion that anything of the sort happened, which is strong evidence against the hoarding explanation....