Bengali nationalist sentiment and the perceived treachery of the violent Quit India uprising. Several historians have critiqued this view, with Tirthankar Roy referring to it as "naive". Instead, Roy attributes the delayed response to rivalry and misinformation spread about the famine within the local government, particularly by the Minister of Civil Supplies Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who maintained there was no food shortage throughout the famine, while noting that there is little evidence of Churchill's views influencing War Cabinet policy. For its part, the report of the Famine Commission (its members appointed in 1944 by the British Government of India and chaired by Sir John Woodhead, a former Indian Civil Service official in Bengal), absolved the British government from all major blame. It acknowledge some failures in its price controls and transportation efforts and laid additional responsibility at the feet of unavoidable fate, but reserved its broadest and most forceful finger-pointing for local politicians in the (largely Muslim) provincial Government of Bengal: As it stated, "after considering all the circumstances, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it lay in the power of the Government of Bengal, by bold, resolute and well-conceived measures at the right time to have largely prevented the tragedy of the famine as it actually took place". For example, the position of the Famine Inquiry Commission with respect to charges that prioritised distribution aggravated the famine is that the Government of Bengal's lack of control over supplies was the more serious matter. Some sources allege that the Famine Commission deliberately declined to blame the UK or was even designed to do so; however, Bowbrick defends the report's overall accuracy, stating it was undertaken without any preconceptions and twice describing it as excellent. Meanwhile, he repeatedly and rather forcefully favors its analyses over Sen's. British accusations that Indian officials were responsible began as early as 1943, as an editorial in The Statesman on 5 October noted disapprovingly. Paul Greenough stands somewhat apart from other analysts by emphasising a pattern of victimization. In his account, Bengal was at base susceptible to famine because of population pressures and market inefficiencies, and these were exacerbated by a dire combination of war, political strife, and natural causes. Above all else, direct blame should be laid on a series of government interventions that disrupted the wholesale rice market. Once the crisis began, morbidity rates were driven by a series of cultural decisions, as dependents