It
was 1919. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires had collapsed; new nations
were springing up from their ruins; talk of self-determination was in the air.
India
had just emerged from the First World War having made enormous sacrifices, and
a huge contribution in men and materiel, blood and treasure, to the British war
effort, in the expectation that it would be rewarded with some measure of
self-government.
Those
hopes were belied. The dishonest Montagu-Chelmsford “reforms” and the punitive
Rowlatt Acts, imposing severe restrictions on Indian political activity and
reimposing wartime prohibitions on freedom of the press and expression, were
India’s only reward.
In
March and April 1919, Indians rallied across Punjab to protest the Rowlatt
Acts; they shut down normal commerce in many cities, demonstrating – through
empty streets and shuttered shops – the dissatisfaction of the people at the
British betrayal. This was a form of Gandhian non-violent non-cooperation; no
violence or disorder was reported. But the British government arrested
nationalist leaders in the city of Amritsar and opened fire on protestors,
killing 10. In the riot that ensued, five Englishmen were killed and a woman
missionary assaulted. (However, she was rescued, and carried to safety, by
Indians.)
The
British promptly sent troops to Amritsar to restore order, under brigadier
general Reginald Dyer. Dyer, who was educated at Midleton College, Cork,
reported to and enjoyed the unstinting support of the Tipperary-born
lieutenant-governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer.
It
is a sobering reminder that the Irish were not merely victims of British
imperialism but complicit in it in many parts of the world.
After
the riot, the city was calm, and whatever demonstrations and protest meetings
were occurring were entirely peaceable.
Nonetheless,
Dyer made several arrests to assert his authority, and on the 13th he issued a
proclamation that forbade people to leave the city without a pass, to organise
demonstrations or processions, or even to gather in groups of more than three.
The
city was seething under these restrictions, but there were no protests.
Meanwhile, unaware of the proclamation, some 10-15,000 people from outlying
districts gathered in the city the same day to celebrate the major religious
festival of Baisakhi.
They
had assembled in an enclosed walled garden, Jallianwala Bagh, a popular spot
for public events in Amritsar but accessible only through five narrow
passageways.
When
Dyer learned of this meeting he did not seek to find out what it was about,
whether the attendees were there in open defiance or merely in ignorance of his
orders. He promptly took a detachment of soldiers in armoured cars and equipped
with machine-guns, and parked his vehicles in front of the gate to the garden.
Without
ordering the crowd to disperse or issuing so much as a warning – and though it
was apparent it was a peaceful assembly of unarmed civilians – Dyer ordered his
troops, standing behind the brick walls surrounding the Bagh, to open fire from
some 150 yards away.
The
crowd of thousands of unarmed and non-violent men, women and children gathered
peacefully in a confined space, started screaming and pressing in panic against
the closed gate, but Dyer ordered his men to keep firing until all their
ammunition was exhausted.
When
the troops had finished firing, they had used 1,650 rounds, killed at least 379
people (the number the British were prepared to admit to; the Indian figures
are considerably higher) and wounded 1,137. Barely a bullet was wasted, Dyer
noted with satisfaction.
There
was no warning, no announcement that the gathering was illegal and had to
disperse, no instruction to leave peacefully – nothing.
Dyer
did not order his men to fire in the air, or at the feet of their targets. They
fired, at his orders, into the chests, the faces, and the wombs of the unarmed
and defenceless crowd.
History
knows the event as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The label connotes the heat
and fire of slaughter, the butchery by bloodthirsty fighters of an outgunned
opposition. But there was nothing of this at Jallianwala.
Dyer’s
soldiers were lined up calmly, almost routinely; they were neither threatened
nor attacked by the crowd; it was just another day’s work, but one unlike any
other. They loaded and fired their rifles coldly, clinically, without haste or
passion or sweat or anger, emptying their magazines into the shrieking,
wailing, then stampeding crowd with trained precision. As people sought to flee
the horror towards the single exit, they were trapped in a murderous fusillade.
Dyer
never showed the slightest remorse or self-doubt. This was a “rebel meeting”,
he claimed, an act of defiance of his authority that had to be punished. “It
was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd” but one of producing a
“moral effect” that would ensure the Indians’ submission. Merely shooting in
the air to disperse the crowd would not have been enough, because the people “would
all come back and laugh at me”.
He
noted that he had personally directed the firing towards the exits (the main
gate and the five narrow passageways) because that was where the crowd was most
dense. “The targets,” he declared, “were good.” The massacre lasted for 10
minutes, and the toll amounted to an extraordinary kill rate, akin to a
turkey-shoot. When it was over and the dead and wounded lay in pools of blood,
moaning on the ground, Dyer forbade his soldiers to give any aid to the
injured. He ordered all Indians to stay off the streets of Amritsar for 24
hours, preventing relatives or friends from bringing even a cup of water to the
wounded, who were writhing in agony on the ground calling for help.
News
of Dyer’s barbarism was suppressed by the British for six months, and when
outrage at reports of his excesses mounted, an attempt was made to whitewash
his sins by the official commission of enquiry, the Hunter Commission, which
only found him guilty of a “grave error”.
Finally,
as details emerged of the horror, Dyer was relieved of his command and censured
by the House of Commons, but promptly exonerated by the House of Lords and
allowed to retire on a handsome pension. Rudyard Kipling, winner of the Nobel
Prize for Literature and the flatulent poetic voice of British imperialism,
hailed him as “the man who saved India”.
Even
this did not strike his fellow Britons in India as adequate recompense for his
glorious act of mass murder. They ran a public campaign for funds to honour his
cruelty and collected the quite stupendous sum of £26,317. 1s. 10d, an
astonishing sum for those days and worth over a quarter of a million pounds
today.
It
was presented to him together with a jewelled sword of honour. In contrast,
after many months of fighting for justice, the families of the victims of the
Jallianwala Bagh massacre were given 500 rupees each in compensation by the
government – at the prevailing exchange rate, approximately £37 (or some £1,450
in today’s money) for each human life.
The
Jallianwala Bagh massacre was no act of insane frenzy but a conscious,
deliberate imposition of colonial will. Dyer was an efficient killer rather
than a crazed maniac; his was merely the evil of the unimaginative, the
brutality of the military bureaucrat. But his action that Baisakhi day came to
symbolise the evil of the system on whose behalf, and in whose defence, he was
acting.
In
the horrified realisation of this truth by Indians of all walks of life lay the
true importance of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. It represented the worst that
colonialism could become, and, by letting it occur, the British crossed that
point of no return that exists only in the minds of men – that point which, in
any unequal relationship, both master and subject must instinctively respect if
their relationship is to survive.
The
massacre made Indians out of millions of people who had not thought consciously
of their political identity before that grim Sunday. It turned loyalists into
nationalists and constitutionalists into agitators, led the Nobel Prize-winning
poet Rabindranath Tagore to return his knighthood to the king and a host of
Indian appointees to British offices to turn in their commissions.
And
above all it entrenched in Mahatma Gandhi a firm and unshakable faith in the
moral righteousness of the cause of Indian independence. He now saw freedom as
indivisible from truth, and he never wavered in his commitment to ridding India
of an empire he saw as irremediably evil, even satanic.
It
is getting late for atonement, but not too late. I dearly hope that a British
prime minister – or a member of the royal family, since every atrocity was
committed in the name of the Crown – will find the heart, and the spirit, to
get on his or her knees at Jallianwala Bagh.
David
Cameron’s rather mealy-mouthed description of the massacre in 2013 as a “deeply
shameful event” does not, in my view, constitute an apology. Nor does the
ceremonial visit to the site in 1997 by Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of
Edinburgh, who merely left their signatures in the visitors’ book, without even
a redeeming comment.
Whoever
the PM is on the centenary of that awful crime will not have been alive when
the atrocity was committed, and certainly no British government of 2019 bears a
shred of responsibility for that tragedy, but as a symbol of the nation that
once allowed it to happen, the PM could atone for the past sins of his or her
nation.
That
is what Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau did in 2016 when he apologised
on behalf of Canada for the actions of his country’s authorities a century
earlier in denying permission for the Indian immigrants on the Komagata Maru to
land in Vancouver, thereby sending many of them to their deaths.
Trudeau’s
gracious apology needs to find its British echo. Indeed, the best form of
atonement by the British might be, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has
suggested, to start teaching unromanticised colonial history in British
schools.
The
British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the British empire, and
what it meant to its subject peoples. These days there appears to be a return
in England to yearning for the Raj, in gauzy, romanticised television soap
operas.
If
British schoolchildren can learn how those dreams of the English turned out to
be nightmares for their subject peoples, true atonement – of the purely moral
kind, involving a serious consideration of historical responsibility rather
than mere admission of guilt – might be achieved.
Dr
Shashi Tharoor is an Indian MP, writer and a former career diplomat. He is the
author of Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, published by Hurst
with a guide price of €25
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