Mukerjee argues that due to Churchill's racial and political worldview the colonial government (under his supreme control) would, in the words of Lord Wavell, feed only those Indians who were "actually fighting or making munitions or working some particular railways".

Mukerjee writes that In the end, it was not so much racism as the imbalance of power inherent in the social Darwinian pyramid that explains why famine could be tolerated in India while bread rationing was regarded as an intolerable deprivation in wartime Britain.

Economist Amartya Sen observes that famine has never occurred in a functioning democracy—a form of government that inverts the traditional power structure by making rulers accountable to those whom they rule.

The Ministry of War Transport warned that such dramatic cuts to shipping capacity in South East Asia would "portend violent changes and perhaps cataclysms in the seaborne trade of large numbers of countries" but was ignored.

"[15] The historian Chandak Sengoopta wrote in The Independent that Mukerjee had researched the famine with "forensic rigour": "Her calmly phrased but searing account of imperial brutality will shame admirers of the Greatest Briton and horrify just about everybody else.

Reviewing the book in The Sunday Times, Max Hastings wrote: To put the matter brutally, millions of Indians were allowed to starve so that available shipping—including vessels normally based in India—could be used to further British purposes elsewhere.

Hastings disagrees with Mukerjee on two points: he doubts that, as she wrote, the British were responsible for the 1945 plane crash that killed Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist leader, and he argues that Churchill cannot be blamed for the 1947 partition of India.

[19]In December 2020, historian Zareer Masani gave the book a negative review in conservative magazine The Critic, describing it as "sensationalist" and a "largely conspiracist attempt to pin responsibility on distant Churchill for undoubted mistakes on the ground in Bengal".