At a dinner party I attended recently, conversation turned to how Great Britain and much of the West were commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill, who was Britain’s prime minister during World War II.

There was much gushing around the table about the man whose policies, statesmanship, resolve, and leadership were responsible for helping to win that war.

Great men should be celebrated for their courage and accomplishments. But in assessing their legacies, you should also examine aspects of their lives that may not fit in with their bigger-than-life personas.

Enough time has passed since his death in 1965 to reassess Mr. Churchill’s legacy. For the people of South Asia, he was not a hero. He was a racist who was responsible for the death by starvation of 3 million Indians. His actions constituted a crime against humanity.

Those people died of a preventable famine in Bengal and other parts of India. Mr. Churchill ordered vital food supplies and medical aid to be sent from India to already well-supplied soldiers in Europe. The British also carried out a scorched-earth policy along the India-Burma border in the hope that Japan would not invade India from Burma.

Some British administrators in India objected to the policies dictated by London. But they were rebuffed. Mr. Churchill’s response to the Bengal famine was: Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like rabbits.

When the British viceroy in India sent a telegram to Mr. Churchill detailing the devastation and the number of people who had died of hunger, the prime minister asked: “Then why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”

In 1931, Lord Irwin, the viceroy, invited Mahatma Gandhi to discuss the deterioration of law and order in India. Mr. Churchill thundered: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the stairs of the Viceregal Palace while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of King-Emperor.”

In the West, many people think that the colonial occupation of the Far East, Middle East, and South Asia was benevolent. Mr. Churchill, an ardent royalist, was forceful in keeping the populations of those colonies under the British yoke.

In most of those lands, there was a sharp distinction and an unbridgeable gulf between the rulers and the ruled. It was apartheid.

I witnessed it as a child in the early 1940s. We natives were forbidden to enter certain establishments or live in certain areas. And if we did enter, we did so as servants and were required to leave the area by sunset.

My dinner partners, though well educated, polite, and friendly, were oblivious to the dark side of British colonial rule in India and the equally dark side of the man who wanted to perpetuate it.

Writing in Time magazine in 2010, Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor called Mr. Churchill the “ugly Briton.” He wrote that Mr. Churchill’s assiduously self-promoted image rests primarily on his WW II rhetoric.

The man who emerges from critical analysis of Mr. Churchill’s legacy is not, in the words of author Harold Evans, “the British Lionheart on the ramparts of civilization,” but a flawed leader who was not concerned about letting 3 million Indians starve to death, so that his soldiers would have extra food they did not need.

Dr. S. Amjad Hussain is a retired Toledo surgeon whose column appears every other week in The Blade. Contact him at:aghaji@bex.net

First Published April 13, 2015, 4:00 a.m.