Abhijit Bhattacharyya | 80 Years After WWII, India Too Must Salute Martyrs

Let the facts and figures speak. More than 65 million people died in the 1939-1945 Second World War. The six-year Armageddon began exclusively as pan-European war till Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, dragging the United States into the conflict in December 1941, and thus making it a truly global conflict, from Europe to Asia and America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Besides the 65 million deaths, no one is quite sure about the precise number of victims of the side-effects of the conflict, of those maimed or with livelihoods destroyed. Russia (then the Soviet Union) lost 30 million people, followed by Germany’s seven million, Poland’s 6.2 million, Yugoslavia’s 6.1 million and Japan’s two million. Other losses were in Hungary (840,000), France (820,000), Greece (520,000), Austria (480,000), Romania (460,000), Italy (410,000), Czechoslovakia (400,000), UK (400,000), and all other European nation states together lost 425,000 people. The US suffered the lowest number of 296,000 casualties.

Despite not being in direct line of fire of main belligerents, mainland China’s deadly civil war between Mao Zedong’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army, along with the sector-specific Japanese assaults, killed 1,324,000 military personnel.

In the midst of all this, no one had time to count the number of dead bodies in India because this country was one of the last Asian nations to face the direct heat of a pan-European war turned into World War II from February 1942 without ever being in the conflict epicentre. The lightning capitulation of the mighty British Empire’s citadel of Singapore brought the Japanese imperial army and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army to the door of British India’s Assam, Manipur and Nagaland. India lost over 100,000 soldiers who served in the British forces in Europe, North Africa, Malaya, Singapore, Burma and the Middle East. What is hardly ever mentioned are the starvation deaths of four million Indians in 1943 due to the Bengal Famine caused by unscrupulous traders in connivance with British Raj officials with the blessings of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill and their collaborators.

So, will it be wrong to suggest that India’s four million deaths were the fifth highest in WWII after Russia’s 30 million, and Germany, Poland and Yugoslavia? Therefore, shouldn’t New Delhi also commemorate the 80 th anniversary of the Second World War’s end with Germany’s surrender as is being done in Moscow on May 9, 2025 (and elsewhere in Europe on May 8) despite the absence of India’s Prime Minister at the Victory Day parade?

India now needs to revise the number of its WWII death toll to 4.1 million to pay tribute to all of them the way Indians rightly do for those 700 who fell to the British Raj’s bullets, with 1,200 grievously injured, in the April 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre. As every country remembers those fallen at the hands of foreign rulers, those who were starved to death by the British and greedy Indian businessmen also deserve to be called out with honour and respect.

Thus, despite the ongoing 38-month Russia-Ukraine war, Moscow’s plan to celebrate 80 years of German surrender and capitulation deserve full support as Russia was the biggest victim of Hitler’s manslaughter, though Moscow ultimately emerged on the winning side. By then, of course, the German dictator, who died by suicide on April 30, 1945, was gone, but his diabolical plot to wipe out the USSR was one of history’s horror stories, despite its eventual failure.

It can well be asked, however, why Russia, which suffered so much at the hands of the Germans over eight decades ago, is inflicting the same kind of punishment in Ukraine today. The answer is also clear. It’s once again a land war, though indirect and by proxy in sum and substance. The adversaries constitute the entire West versus Russia, supported mostly by some Asian nations. The belated physical participation of combatants from North Korea in the conflict makes the entire situation far more complex for any future resolution.

But that doesn’t take the real history off the radar of Russia and the non- Russia West’s mutual enmity, which goes back more than 100 years. A few citations will suffice. Recall the post-1917 Bolshevik Revolution when Moscow was in disarray. Marshal Pilsudski, the head of Polish state and commander-in-chief of its army, set out in the spring of 1920 to conquer Ukraine for Warsaw. Ultimately, though, Poland failed to get Kyiv, and the 1921 Treaty of Riga resulted in territorial gain of 240 km for Poland and a loss for Moscow following the First World War. It only goes to show that warfare for land acquisition in Europe is nothing new.

What is, however, important is that unlike the wars in other parts of the world, such as Asia, Africa, Australia and even the Americas, conflicts in Europe invariably drag the whole of the non-West world into its intra- Europe dispute and destruction, with a heady mixture of history, geography, polity, commerce, trade, social fault lines and the inherent streak of imperialism in its DNA. The core countries of the West still want to be seen as the messiah of all mankind.

It can be seen that the USSR, which became Russia’s official name in 1923, remained a diplomatic pariah, not being granted recognition as a sovereign state by the West for long. While a trade agreement between Britain and the USSR was signed in March 1921, and Germany and the Soviet Union concluded the Treaty of Rapallo in April 1922, London granted recognition to Moscow only in February 1924, and admission to the League of Nations followed in September 1934.

In the period between the two world wars (1919-1939), Moscow continued to be treated the way the West prefers to treat it even today: as a pariah to be dealt with suspicion and kept in isolation as much as possible. The pivot of Europe then, as now, consisted of London, Paris, Rome and Berlin. When Britain and France sought to appease Hitler in Munich in September 1938, Moscow was left to fend for itself before Hitler’s “Look East” foray, without fear from the West. Russia, therefore, also made peace with Hitler in August 1939. The Second World War broke out after a week, and Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, ignoring his pact with Stalin. Moscow almost broke into pieces in 1941-1942. The game of history thus goes on creating and re-creating geography in all directions. As Russia honours its 30 million dead, India too should join in and salute its fallen 4.1 million martyrs, fallen to advance the wars of the West.