Very few moments in the history of our sub-continent are as repulsive to remember and yet as significant to history as the infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The horrendous incident of the brutal, cold-blooded murder of 500 to 600 peaceful protestors at the hands of British imperialist rule is considered a dark chapter in the history of the Indian struggle for independence.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place on April 13, 1919, when a group of peaceful protestors was gunned down in an enclosed park with only one exit. To commemorate the spirits of all the innocent lives lost in this incident, the Government of India erected a monument in 1951. A museum was also opened in March 2019, known as Yaad-e-Jallian Museum, to put forth an authentic account of the massacre.
A large peaceful crowd had gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, British India, to protest against the Rowlatt Act and arrest of pro-independence activists Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal. In response to the public gathering, the temporary brigadier general, R. E. H. Dyer, surrounded the protesters with his Gurkha, Baloch, Rajput and Sikh troops from 2-9th Gurkhas, the 54th Sikhs and the 59th Scinde Rifles of the British Indian Army. The Jallianwala Bagh could only be exited on one side, as its other three sides were enclosed by buildings. After blocking the exit with his troops, he ordered them to shoot at the crowd, continuing to fire even as the protestors tried to flee. The troops kept on firing until their ammunition was exhausted. Estimates of those killed vary between 379 and 1,500 or more people and over 1,200 other people were injured of whom 192 were seriously injured.
The massacre caused a re-evaluation by the British Army of its military role against civilians to “minimal force whenever possible”, although later British actions during the Mau Mau rebellion in the Kenya Colony have led historian Huw Bennett to comment that the new policy could be put aside. The army was retrained and developed less violent tactics for crowd control. The level of casual brutality, and lack of any accountability, stunned the entire nation, resulting in a wrenching loss of faith of the general Indian public in the intentions of the United Kingdom. The attack was condemned by the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, as “unutterably monstrous”, and in the UK House of Commons debate on 8 July 1920 Members of Parliament voted 247 to 37 against Dyer. The ineffective inquiry, together with the initial accolades for Dyer, fuelled great widespread anger against the British among the Indian populace, leading to the non-cooperation movement of 1920-22. Some historians consider the episode a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India. Britain has never formally apologized for the massacre but expressed “deep regret” in 2019.
Background
During World War I, British India contributed to the British war effort by providing men and resources. Millions of Indian soldiers and laborers served in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, while both the Indian administration and the princes sent large supplies of food, money, and ammunition. Bengal and Punjab remained sources of anti-colonial activities. Revolutionary attacks in Bengal, associated increasingly with disturbances in Punjab, were enough to nearly paralyse the regional administration. Of these, a pan-Indian mutiny in the British Indian Army planned for February 1915 was the most prominent amongst a number of plots formulated between 1914 and 1917 by Indian nationalists in India, the United States and Germany.
The planned February mutiny was ultimately thwarted when British intelligence infiltrated the Ghadar Movement, arresting key figures. Mutinies in smaller units and garrisons within India were also crushed. In the context of the British war effort and the threat from the separatist movement in India, the Defence of India Act 1915 was passed, limiting civil and political liberties. Michael O’Dwyer, then the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, was one of the strongest proponents of the act, in no small part due to the Ghadarite threat in the province.
The Rowlatt Act
The costs of the protracted war in money and manpower were great. High casualty rates in the war, increasing inflation after the end, compounded by heavy taxation, the deadly 1918 flu pandemic, and the disruption of trade during the war escalated human suffering in India. The pre-war Indian nationalist sentiment was revived as moderate and extremist groups of the Indian National Congress ended their differences to unify. In 1916, the Congress was successful in establishing the Lucknow Pact, a temporary alliance with the All-India Muslim League. British political concessions and Whitehall’s India Policy after World War I began to change, with the passage of Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, which initiated the first round of political reform in the Indian subcontinent in 1917.
However, this was deemed insufficient in reforms by the Indian political movement. Mahatma Gandhi, recently returned to India, began emerging as an increasingly charismatic leader under whose leadership civil disobedience movements grew rapidly as an expression of political unrest.
The recently crushed Ghadar conspiracy, the presence of Raja Mahendra Pratap’s Kabul mission in Afghanistan (with possible links to Bolshevik Russia), and a still-active revolutionary movement especially in Punjab and Bengal (as well as worsening civil unrest throughout India) led to the appointment of a sedition committee in 1918 chaired by Sidney Rowlatt, an Anglo-Egyptian judge. It was tasked to evaluate German and Bolshevik links to the militant movement in India, especially in Punjab and Bengal. On the recommendations of the committee, the Rowlatt Act, an extension of the Defence of India Act 1915 to limit civil liberties, was enacted.
The passage of the Rowlatt Act in 1919 precipitated large-scale political unrest throughout India. Ominously, in 1919, the Third Anglo-Afghan War began in the wake of Amir Habibullah’s assassination and institution of Amanullah in a system strongly influenced by the political figures courted by the Kabul mission during the world war. As a reaction to the Rowlatt Act, Muhammad Ali Jinnah resigned from his Bombay seat, writing in a letter to the Viceroy, “I, therefore, as a protest against the passing of the Bill and the manner in which it was passed tender my resignation … a Government that passes or sanctions such a law in times of peace forfeits its claim to be called a civilized government”. Gandhi’s call for protest against the Rowlatt Act achieved an unprecedented response of furious unrest and protests.
The massacre
On Sunday, 13 April 1919, Dyer, convinced a major insurrection could take place, banned all meetings. This notice was not widely disseminated, and many villagers gathered in the Bagh to celebrate the important Sikh festival of Baisakhi, and peacefully protest the arrest and deportation of two national leaders, Satyapal and Saifuddin Kitchlew.
At 9:00 on the morning of 13 April 1919, the traditional festival of Baisakhi, Reginald Dyer, the acting military commander for Amritsar and its environs, proceeded through the city with several city officials, announcing the implementation of a pass system to enter or leave Amritsar, a curfew beginning at 20:00 that night and a ban on all processions and public meetings of four or more persons. The proclamation was read and explained in English, Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi, but few paid it any heed or appear to have learned of it later. Meanwhile, local police had received intelligence of the planned meeting in the Jallianwala Bagh through word of mouth and plainclothes detectives in the crowds. At 12:40, Dyer was informed of the meeting and returned to his base at around 13:30 to decide how to handle it.
By mid-afternoon, thousands of Indians had gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh (garden) near the Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar. Many who were present had earlier worshipped at the Golden Temple, and were passing through the Bagh on their way home. The Bagh was (and remains today) an open area of six to seven acres, roughly 200 yards by 200 yards in size, and surrounded on all sides by walls roughly 10 feet in height. Balconies of houses three to four stories tall overlooked the Bagh, and five narrow entrances opened onto it, several with lockable gates. During the rainy season, it was planted with crops, but served as a local meeting and recreation area for much of the year. In the centre of the Bagh was a samadhi (cremation site) and a large well partly filled with water which measured about 20 feet in diameter.
Apart from pilgrims, Amritsar had filled up over the preceding days with farmers, traders, and merchants attending the annual Baisakhi horse and cattle fair. The city police closed the fair at 14:00 that afternoon, resulting in an even larger number of people drifting into the Jallianwala Bagh.
Dyer arranged for an airplane to overfly the Bagh and estimate the size of the crowd, that he reported was about 6,000, while the Hunter Commission estimates a crowd of 10,000 to 20,000 had assembled by the time of Dyer’s arrival. Colonel Dyer and Deputy Commissioner Irving, the senior civil authority for Amritsar, took no actions to prevent the crowd assembling, or to peacefully disperse the crowds. This would later be a serious criticism leveled at both Dyer and Irving.
An hour after the meeting began as scheduled at 17:30, Colonel Dyer arrived at the Bagh with a group of 50 troops, including 25 Gurkhas of 1/9 Gurkha Rifles (1st battalion, 9th Gurkha Rifles), Pathans and Baluch and 59th Sindh Rifles. All fifty were armed with .303 Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles. Dyer may have specifically chosen troops from those ethnic groups due to their proven loyalty to the British. He had also brought two armored cars armed with machine guns; however, the vehicles could not enter the compound through the narrow entrances. The Jallianwala Bagh was surrounded on all sides by houses and buildings and had only five narrow entrances, most kept permanently locked. The main entrance was relatively wide, but was guarded heavily by the troops backed by the armored vehicles so as to prevent anyone from getting out.
Dyer, without warning the crowd to disperse, blocked the main exits. Dyer ordered his troops to begin shooting toward the densest sections of the crowd in front of the available narrow exits, where panicked crowds were trying to leave the Bagh. Firing continued for approximately ten minutes. Unarmed civilians including men, women, elderly people and children were killed. This incident came to be known as the Amritsar massacre. Cease-fire was ordered only when ammunition supplies were almost exhausted. The troops having fired about one third of their ammunition. He stated later that this act “was not to disperse the meeting but to punish the Indians for disobedience.”
The following day Dyer stated in a report that “I have heard that between 200 and 300 of the crowd were killed. My party fired 1,650 rounds”. Apart from the many deaths directly from the shooting, a number of people died of crushing in the stampedes at the narrow gates or by jumping into the solitary well on the compound to escape the shooting. A plaque, placed at the site after independence, states that 120 bodies were removed from the well. Dyer pushed the curfew time earlier than the usual time; therefore, the wounded could not be moved from where they had fallen and more who had been injured then died during the night.
Casualties
The number of total casualties is disputed. The following morning’s newspapers quoted an erroneous initial figure of 200 casualties.
The Government of Punjab, criticized by the Hunter Commission for not gathering accurate figures, only offered the same approximate figure of 200. When interviewed by the members of the committee a senior civil servant in Punjab admitted that the actual figure could be higher. The Sewa Samiti society independently carried out an investigation and reported 379 deaths, and 192 seriously wounded. The Hunter Commission based their figures of 379 deaths, and approximately 3 times that number injured, suggesting 1500 casualties. At the meeting of the Imperial Legislative Council held on 12 September 1919, the investigation led by Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya concluded that there were 42 boys among the dead, the youngest of them only 7 months old. The Hunter commission confirmed the deaths of 337 men, 41 boys and a six-week-old baby.
In July 1919, three months after the massacre, officials were tasked with finding who had been killed by inviting inhabitants of the city to volunteer information about those who had died. This information was incomplete due to fear that those who participated would be identified as having been present at the meeting, and some of the dead may not have had close relations in the area.
Winston Churchill reported nearly 400 slaughtered, and 3 or 4 times the number wounded to the Westminster Parliament, on 8 July 1920.
Since the official figures were obviously flawed regarding the size of the crowd (6,000-20,000), the number of rounds fired and the period of shooting, the Indian National Congress instituted a separate inquiry of its own, with conclusions that differed considerably from the British Government’s inquiry. The casualty number quoted by the Congress was more than 1,500, with approximately 1,000 being killed.
Indian nationalist Swami Shraddhanand wrote to Gandhi of 1500 deaths in the incident.
The British Government tried to suppress information of the massacre, but news spread in India and widespread outrage ensued; details of the massacre did not become known in Britain until December 1919.
Assassination of Michael O’Dwyer
On 13 March 1940, at Caxton Hall in London, Udham Singh, an Indian independence activist from Sunam who had witnessed the events in Amritsar and had himself been wounded, shot and killed Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab at the time of the massacre, who had approved Dyer’s action and was believed to have been the main planner.
Some, such as the nationalist newspaper Amrita Bazar Patrika, made statements supporting the killing. The common people and revolutionaries glorified the action of Udham Singh. Much of the press worldwide recalled the story of Jallianwala Bagh, and alleged O’Dwyer to have been responsible for the massacre. Singh was termed a “fighter for freedom” and his action was referred to in The Times newspaper as “an expression of the pent-up fury of the down-trodden Indian People”.
Singh had told the court at his trial: I did it because I had a grudge against him. He deserved it. He was the real culprit. He wanted to crush the spirit of my people, so I have crushed him. For full 21 years, I have been trying to wreak vengeance. I am happy that I have done the job. I am not scared of death. I am dying for my country. I have seen my people starving in India under the British rule. I have protested against this, it was my duty. What greater honor could be bestowed on me than death for the sake of my motherland?
Singh was hanged on 31 July 1940. At that time, many, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, condemned the murder as senseless even if it was courageous. In 1952, Nehru (by then Prime Minister) honored Udham Singh with the following statement, which appeared in the daily Partap: I salute Shaheed-i-Azam Udham Singh with reverence who had kissed the noose so that we may be free.
Soon after this recognition by the Prime Minister, Udham Singh received the title of Shaheed, a name given to someone who has attained martyrdom or done something heroic on behalf of their country or religion.