Indian News Parade 62 opens with coverage of Gandhi’s release from his incarceration in the Aga Khan’s Palace on 6 May 1944. Philip Woods noted that ‘the appearance of the Mahatma in the Indian newsreel stood in marked contrast to his almost complete absence from the British newsreels during the war’, suggesting that this could be explained, in part, by the Government’s refusal to allow cameramen access to Gandhi (Woods, 2000, 104). Indian film historian B.D. Garga suggests that such an event was ‘too big for the official agencies to ignore’, yet Gandhi’s appearance in the newsreel infuriated the Home Department. In a note market ‘SECRET’, the home department wrote to the Secretary of Information and Broadcasting and complained that this event ‘should not have been given any film publicity’. ‘We regard Gandhi and the other Congress leaders AS ENEMIES OF THE STATE’, a further note remarked, ‘and therefore deserving of no support whatsoever by the State, even the indirect support that publicity to their doings in a state-produced newsreel offers’ (Garga, 2007, 105).

The Government announced Gandhi’s release in a press statement. ‘In view of the medical reports of Mr Gandhi’s health’, it began, ‘Government have decided to release him unconditionally. The decision has been taken solely on medical grounds’ (Indian Information, 15 May 1944, 537). Churchill had opposed plans to release Gandhi, who had been detained since August 1942, but Gandhi’s health had seriously deteriorated with the after-effects of malaria, and Wavell, the Viceroy of India, convinced Churchill that his death in custody would be a political disaster and only increase anti-Government sentiment. Wavell also speculated, inaccurately, that Gandhi’s health would prevent him from continuing in politics.

The Times, in writing on Gandhi’s release, claimed that ‘the press, both Nationalist and British owned, has warmly welcomed the Government’s move. There is a wide feeling that credit for the release is due to Lord Wavell, whose prestige, already high, has been increased’ (The Times, 8 May 1944, 4). Churchill, whose dislike of Gandhi has been widely noted, was less impressed. Indeed, Wavell’s diary contained an entry less than two months after Gandhi’s release stating, ‘Winston sent me a peevish telegram to ask me why Gandhi hadn’t died yet’ (Wolpert, 2006, 65).

Indian News Parade 62 also provides an update on the Bengal Famine – featured in at least nine of the previous twenty-five editions – which suggested that the famine had now been defeated. While the famine had reached its apex at the end of 1943, epidemics were rife in rural Bengal until the end of 1944, and Paul Greenough further noted that ‘disease mortality stayed well above the pre–famine levels till at least the middle of 1946’. Greenough concluded that while popularly referred to as the famine of ‘1943-44’, the famine ‘can be said to have begun in December 1942 and ended in mid-1946’ with relief work from voluntary organisations continuing well into 1946 (Greenough, 1982, 141).

Philip Woods noted that the newsreel represented the Bengal famine as a ‘natural disaster which government and armed forces were acting effectively to combat’. This approach, as Woods argued, overlooked the now widely acknowledged ‘man-made’ causes (Woods, 2000, 103). Wavell had informed Amery in 1943 that the famine in Bengal was ‘largely due to ministerial incompetence’ – as emphasised by many Indians at the time – and the new Governor of Bengal, Richard Casey, strongly outlined the accumulated failings of the British within the province in his correspondence with Wavell (Wolpert, 2006, 62).

The Indian News Parade’s triumphalist approach to the Bengal famine did not always play well at local screenings. Sanjoy Bhattacharya suggested that district officers adapted the official Government lecture notes and were particularly uncomfortable with episodes that ‘combined snippets of Allied victories in South East Asia with images of the ever improving transport and food-supply networks in India’ (Bhattacharya, 2001, 95). The nationalist journal, Film India, had complained a year earlier, in the context of India’s famine, about footage of relief work for Polish children in Indian Movietone News 9. ‘To provide comfortable sanctuaries to foreign refugees, India has to turn her own out on the streets’, the journal argued, further adding that ‘while every foreigner whether an adventurer or a refugee, gets a happy comfortable home in India, the land of plenty, the sons of the soil are suffering from dire want and poverty’ (Film India, February 1943, 19). Over 6000 Polish refugees found shelter in stationary settlements in India between 1942 and 1948 (Piotrowski, 2004, 128).

The final item – ‘Behind the lines on the Arakan Front’ – illustrated the Indian treatment of Japanese prisoners. Sir Sultan Ahmed, the Government Minister for Information and Broadcasting, travelled to Burma in May 1944 and witnessed the work of doctors of the 7th Indian Division treating Japanese prisoners at Imphal (Indian Information, 1 June 1944, 573). Government propaganda accentuated the ‘atrocity stories’ of the Japanese treatment of Indian soldiers, claiming for example that Indian soldiers were ‘being used as live targets for bayonet practice’. These were also noted in issues of Indian News Parade (e.g. INP 53), while reports circulated of the Japanese disrespect for Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism. Radio broadcasts also contrasted the ‘peace and prosperity’ of India with the economic chaos of those areas under Japanese control (Bhattacharya, 2000, 497-500).