Massacre of Jallianwala Bagh

“He was the real culprit. He deserved it.
He wanted to crush the spirit of my people, so I have crushed him.”
– Shaheed Udham Singh, telling the trial court why he killed former Punjab Lieutenant-Governor Michael O’Dwyer. .

A crude, weather-beaten statue is the sole memorial to Shaheed Udham Singh at Sunam, his hometown in Punjab. Udham Singh, who bore the name Ram Mohammad Singh Azaad then, was hanged in June 1940 for the murder of Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor who presided over the brutal British suppression of the 1919 uprising in Punjab. Udham Singh’s ashes were returned to India in 1974.

O’Dwyer’s killing marked the end of a chain of events that began, in a sense, at 4:30 p.m. on April 13, 1919, when Brigadier General Reginald Dyer opened fire on an unarmed gathering in Jallianwala Bagh. Udham Sigh was a witness to that carnage. Through 21 years of revolutionary activity in the United Kingdom, the United States, Africa and India, Udham Singh saw avenging the massacre as his destiny. Jallianwala Bagh radicalised an entire generation and laid the foundation for Punjab’s vigorous secular political traditions. The traditions forged by Udham Singh and his peers are as relevant now as they were seven decades ago.

In the spring of 1919, Punjab was at a crossroads of history. The First World War was over, and soldiers were returning to discover an India more impoverished and less free than it was when they left. News of that tumultuous event, the Russian Revolution, has fired the imagination of thousands of young people. Memories of the failed Punjab gadar (revolt) of 1914-1915, led by Sikh emigrants to North America who returned to India embittered by racial discrimination, were fresh.

The trial and martyrdom of the Gadar Party leadership in the Lahore Conspiracy trial, and the internment of some 1,500 of the emigrants in India, proved an abiding symbol for a younger generation of radicals. News of young Muslim Mohajirs who had left to fight for the restoration of the Turkish Caliphate but ended up struggling in the ranks of the Red Army during the defense of Kirke, also trickled in. In Punjab, the doubling of prices of wheat, rice and bajra, and the tripling of salt prices fuelled discontent, particularly among artisans and peasants.
The Congress’ anti-Rowlatt Act agitation exploded on this landscape. The laws sought to grant special powers to the colonial government to suppress dissent, curtailing the right of appeal and enabling a committee not bound by rules of evidence to find individuals guilty of inciting offences against the state. Pan-India reaction was furious, and the Congress’ call for non-violent protest was widely endorsed.

By April 6, the anti-Rowlatt satyagraha was at its peak in Punjab. “Practically the whole of Lahore was on the streets,” historian Hari Singh has recorded.

“The immense crowd that passed through Anarkali was estimated to be around 20,000.” In Amritsar, over 5,000 people gathered at Jallianwala Bagh. By April 9, Ram Navami day, traditionally riot-prone, a new spirit seemed to be in the air. Hindu and Muslim protesters drank water from the same glass. British authority appeared to be collapsing. “The Khan Bahadurs and Rai Sahibs are dead,” Amritsar Deputy Commissioner Miles Irving wrote, explaining his lack of control over events, “and are not fresh corpses at that.”

On April 10, 1919, the Empire tried to hit back. Two key Punjab Congress leaders, the Cambridge-educated allopath Dr. Saifuddin Kitchlew and his homeopath colleague Dr. Satyapal, were deported to the Kangra Valley. News of Gandhi’s arrest the previous day at Palwal soon reached Amritsar. The city exploded. Over 15,000 people gathered at the Carriage Bridge and demanded to know the whereabouts of Satyapal and Kitchlew. Although lawyers Gurdial Salaria and Maqbool Mohammad tried to move the crowd away towards the Telegraph House, Miles Irving ordered a firing. Maqbool Mohammad later deposed to an inquiry committee set up by the Congress that between 20 and 25 people were killed or injured. The enraged crowd, armed with lathis, turned on British officials. Four British residents were killed and two were seriously injured; one, missionary Marcella Sherwood, was left for dead. Government property was burned and looted, with persons from the Katra Kanhaiya red light area and members of the Pherna and Safeda communities (“criminal tribes”, in colonial nomenclature) joining the revolt.

When Brigadier General Dyer arrived in Amritsar from Jalandhar at 9 p.m. the next day, his fellow British residents had convinced themselves that the events of 1857 were about to repeat themselves. Irving had called Maqbool Mohammad and asked him to inform the city that it was under military occupation. In Lahore, the uprising had yet to subside. The Danda Fauj (stick-army) of impoverished Muslim artisans led by Chanan Din marched through the streets with sticks and toy guns, declaring their loyalty to the Amir of Afghanistan and the German Kaiser. Crowds of students proclaimed the death of King George, while rumours were spread that Indian troops had mutinied in the Lahore cantonment. More dangerously for the Raj, the 4,000 Indian railway employees in Lahore went on strike. Even in rural Kasur, which had earned the wrath of Amritsar and Lahore by failing to join the hartal of April 6, huge demonstrations were held. “This is our last chance,” local leader Nadir Ali Shah told the gathering. “We must remove the knife around our throat.”

On the morning of April 13, Vaisakhi day, Dyer’s troops marched through Amritsar, proclaiming that all assemblies would be “dispersed by force of arms if necessary.” Shortly afterwards, two people walked through the city banging tin cans to announce a rally at 4:30 p.m. at Jallianwala Bagh. By afternoon, a peace gathering of over 20,000 people was in place, hearing a succession of speeches condemning the Rowlatt Act and the recent arrests and firings. (Many of those who had gathered at the maiden, however, were villagers, who were on a visit to Amritsar on the occasion of the Vaisakhi fair, and were probably unaware of the morning’s drama).

No effort, Dyer later admitted, had been made to prevent the gathering from taking place, a fact which, coupled with rally organiser Hans Raj’s somewhat murky background, led some contemporary observers, including Madam Mohan Malaviya, to speculate that the dusty maiden had been deliberately chosen as a killing field. An aircraft briefly hovered overhead as five speeches were completed before Dyer arrived at Jallianwala Bagh, along with two young officers, Briggs and Anderson, 50 Indian and British rifle-men, 40 Gurkhas, and two armoured cars. The armoured cars were left on the road outside the maiden, for the sole entrance was too narrow to accommodate them.

A few minutes before sunset, the first of 1,650 rounds were fired into the crowd. Congress leader Durga Das at first believed the shots were fired into the air, but soon realised bodies were falling all around him. No warning was given to disperse before Dyer opened fire. Many died when they jumped into the well at the left-hand side of the maiden, only to be crushed by others who desperately dived on top of them. The wounded cried for help, but there was no aid at hand.

“I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed,” Dyer told the official Lord William Hunter Committee of Inquiry set up to probe the violence, “and I consider this is the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral and widespread effect it was my duty to produce, if I was to justify my action.”
“It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd,” he added, “but one of producing a sufficient moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were present but more specifically throughout the Punjab. There would be no question of undue severity.”

To this day, no one knows how many died. The Punjab Government first asserted that 291 people were killed, but this figure was promptly challenged by the Allahabad-based Sewa Samity, which produced a list of 500 verified deaths, based partly on its work in aiding the injured and cremating bodies. An enquiry by Amritsar Deputy Commissioner F.H. Burton later raised the official toll to 379, broadly accepting the Sewa Samiti list but deducting 44 unknown rural bodies cremated by the organisation, and some alleged inaccuracies.
“It is interesting to note,” the Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the Punjab Sub-Committee of the Indian National Congress argued, “that by the Government’s own showing, they did not commence investigations before the 20th August, that is, four months after the tragedy”. “The exact figure”, the report concluded, “will never be known, but after careful investigation, we consider that Lala Girdhari Lal’s computation of 1,000 is by no means an exaggerated calculation.” It is not impossible that the figure could have been higher, given the turmoil and poor communications of the time.
Jallianwala Bagh was only the beginning of a prolonged phase of appalling brutality. In Gujranwala town, an attempt to provoke a communal riot on April 14 by hanging up the leg of a pig and a dead calf came to nothing’ the police were held responsible, and fighting followed. News of the Jallianwala Bagh killings reached the town, leading students and migrant labourers from Kashmir to set ablaze the Kachi bridge, the tehsil headquarters, the dak bungalow, the local courts, and the railway station.
Spontaneous protests broke out in rural tracts such as Sheikhpura, Sangla and Chuharkhana. The local authorities asked for military help, and since the bridges to the town were destroyed, airplanes were used to put down the rebellion. Aircraft from Lahore dropped three bombs on protesting crowds on April 14 and 15, following it up with machine-gun fire. Armoured trains were used to fire at demonstrators in Kasur. The official death toll, just 11 in the Gujranwala bombing and strafing, for example, appears laughable. A total of 334 people were reported killed in the uprising.
On April 18, an unhappy Gandhi called off the satyagraha, alarmed by growing violence. Colonial reprisals began. From April 19 to 24, Dyer enforced the notorious ‘crawling order’, forcing all those using the street where Marcella Sherwood was assaulted to pass on all fours, their noses to the ground. Martial Law Order 7 even mandated that in the presence of Europeans Indians must dismount, and “salute with their right hand respectfully.”
In Lahore, college students were ordered to walk up to 20 km in the sun four times a day for roll call before military administrators. In Gujranwala, those arrested for the disturbances were forced to work as punkha-pullers (to operate a hand-operated fanning device) for soldiers. At Kasur, the six largest school students were whipped simply for their size. Throughout Punjab, infringements of the salaam order were punished by whipping and beatings. In all 1,229 people, largely urban artisans and youth, were convicted of involvement in the uprising. Eighteen people were sentenced to death, 23 were transported for life and 58 were flogged on the orders of the Martial Law Commission.
The Hunter Committee split down the middle, with its three Indian members, Jagat Narayan, C.H. Setalvad and Sultan Ahmad, authoring a dissent. The majority condemned Dyer, arguing that in “continuing firing as long as he did, it appears to us that General Dyer committed a grave error,” but broadly endorsed other acts of violent repression, even failing to indict the pilots of the aircraft used at Gujranwala. The dissenting members, understandably, argued that the martial law regime’s use of force was wholly unjustified. “General Dyer thought he had crushed the rebellion and Sir Michael O’Dwyer was of the same view,” they wrote, “(but) there was no rebellion which required to be crushed.”
Dyer was relieved of active service as a consequence of the committee’s findings, but the House of Lords later approved his actions, passing a resolution deploring “the conduct of the case of General Dyer as unjust to that officer.”
In an objective sense, Dyer ensured the end of the Raj. “Think what this means,” an appalled Josiah Wedgwood told the House of Commons. “You will have a shrine erected there and every year there will be processions of Indians visiting the tombs of the martyrs and Englishmen will go there and stand bare headed before it.” Punjab’s politics of resistance was to be shaped by the events of 1919. The young Bhagat Singh, just 11 at the time visited the blood-soaked maiden, and his anger was to fuel his politics in years to come. For Bhagat Singh’s Bharat Naujawan Sabha, the massacre was to provide a symbol that would help negate the morass of apathy to which the end of the non-cooperation movement led.
A spectrum of Left groups, as well as radical elements in the Congress, were to lay claim to the heritage of the 1919 uprising. Today, as the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance seeks to appropriate the legacies of Shaheed Udham Singh and Bhagat Singh, reclaiming the real meaning of that struggle has never been more important.

taken from the magazine FRONTLINE dated November 14, 1997 by PRAVEEN SWAMI

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The Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre involved the killing of hundreds of unarmed, defenceless Indians by a senior British military officer, took place on 13 April 1919 in the heart of Amritsar, the holiest city of the Sikhs, on a day sacred to them as the birth anniversary of the Khalsa. Jallianvala Bagh,. a garden belonging to the Jalla, derives name from that of the owners of this piece of land in Sikh times. It was then the property the family of Sardar Himmat Singh (d.1829), a noble in the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780-1839), who originally came from the village of Jalla, now in Fatehgarh Sahib district of the Punjab. The family were collectively known as Jallhevale or simply Jallhe or Jalle, although their principal seat later became Alavarpur in Jalandhar district. The site, once a garden or garden house, was in 1919 an uneven and unoccupied space, an irregular quadrangle, indifferently walled, approximately 225 x 180 metres which was used more as a dumping ground .

In the Punjab, during World War I (1914-18), there was considerable unrest particularly among the Sikhs, first on account of the demolition of a boundary wall of Gurdwara Rikabgang at New Delhi and later because of the activities and trials of the Ghadrites almost all of whom were Sikhs. In India as a whole, too, there had been a spurt in political activity mainly owing to the emergence of two leaders Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869-1948) who after a period of struggle against the British in South Africa, had returned to India in January 1915 and Mrs Annie Besant (1847-1933), head of the Theosophical Society of India, who established, on 11 April 1916, Home Rule League with autonomy for India as its goal. In December 1916, the Indian National Congress, at its annual session held at Lucknow, passed a resolution asking the British government to issue a proclamation announcing that it is the aim and intention of British policy to confer self government on India at an early date. At the same time India having Contributed significantly to the British war effort had been expecting advancement of her political interests after the conclusion of hostilities. On the British side, the Secretary of State for India E.S Montagu, announced, on 20 August 1917; the policy of His Majesty’s Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India . However, the Viceroy of India Lord Chelmsford, appointed, on 10 December 1917, a Sedition Committee, popularly known as Rowlatt Committee after the name of its chairman, to investigate and report on the nature and extent of the criminal conspiracies connected with the revolutionary movement in India, and to advise as to the legislation necessary to deal with them. Based on the recommendations of this committee, two bills, popularly called Rowlatt Bills, were published in the Government of India Gazette on 18 January 1919. Mahatma Gandhi decided to organize a satyagrah, non-violent civil disobedience campaign) against the bills. One of the bills became an Act, nevertheless, on 21 March 1919. Call for a countrywide hartal or general strike on 30 March, later postponed to 6 April 1919, was given by Mahatma Gandhi.

The strike in Lahore and Amritsar passed off peacefully on 6 April. On 9 April, the governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer (1864-1940), suddenly decided to deport from Amritsar Dr Satyapal and Dr Saif ud-Din Kitchlew, two popular leaders of men. On the same day Mahatma Gandhi’s entry into Punjab was banned under the Defence of India Rules. On 10 April, Satyapal and Kitchlew were called to the deputy commissioner’s residence, arrested and sent off by car to Dharamsetla, a hill town, now in Himachal Pradesh. This led to a general strike in Amritsar. Excited groups of citizens soon merged together into a crowd of about 50,000 marching on to protest to the deputy commissioner against the deportation of the two leaders. The crowd, however, was stopped and fired upon near the railway foot-bridge.

According to the official version, the number of those killed was 12 and of those wounded between 20 and 30. But evidence before the Congress Enquiry Committee put the number of the dead between 20 and 30. As those killed were being carried back through the streets, an angry mob of people went on the rampage. Government offices and banks were attacked and damaged, and five Europeans were beaten to death. One Miss Marcella Sherwood, manager of the City Mission School, who had been living in Amritsar district for 15 years working for the Church of England Zenana Missionary Society, was attacked. The civil authorities, unnerved by the unexpected fury of the mob, called in the army the same afternoon. The ire of the people had by and large spent itself, but a sullen hatred against the British persisted. There was an uneasy calm in the city on 11 April. In the evening that day, Brigadier-General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer (b. 1864, ironically at Murree in the Punjab), commander 45th Infantry Brigade at Jalandhar, arrived in Amritsar. He immediately established file facto army rule, though the official proclamation to this effect was not made until 15 April. The troops at his disposal included 475 British and 710 Indian soldiers. On 12 April he issued an order prohibiting all meetings and gatherings.

On 13 April which marked the Baisakhi festival, a large number of people, mostly Sikhs, had poured into the city from the surrounding villages. Local leaders called upon the people to assemble for a meeting in the Jallianvala Bagh at 4.30 in the evening. Brigadier-General Dyer set out for the venue of the meeting at 4.30 with 50 riflemen and two armoured cars with machine guns mounted on them. Meanwhile, the meeting had gone on peacefully, and two resolutions, one calling for the repeal of the Rowlatt Act and the other condemning the firing on 10 April, had been passed. A third resolution protesting against the general repressive policy of the government was being proposed when Dyer arrived at about 5.15 p.m. He deployed his riflemen on an elevation near the entrance and without warning or ordering the crowd to disperse, opened fire. The firing continued for about 20 minutes whereafter Dyer and his men marched back the way they had come. 1650 rounds of .303-inch ammunition had been fired. Dyer’s own estimate of the killed based on his rough calculations of one dead per six bullets fired was between 200 and 300. The official figures were 379 killed and 1200 wounded.

According to Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, who personally collected information with a view to raising the issue in the Central Legislative Council, over 1,000 were killed. The total crowd was estimated at between 15,000 and 20,000, Sikhs comprising a large proportion of them.

The protest that broke out in the country is exemplified by the renunciation by Rabindranath Tagore of the British Knighthood. In a letter to the Governor General he wrote: . The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand shorn of all special distinctions by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradations not fit for human beings Mass riots erupted in the Punjab and the government had to place five of the districts under martial law. Eventually an enquiry committee was set up. The Disorder Inquiry Committee known as Hunter Committee after its chairman, Lord Hunter, held Brigadier-General R.E.H. Dyer guilty of a mistaken notion of duty, and he was relieved of his command and prematurely retired from the army. The Indian National Congress held its annual session in December 1919 at Amritsar and called upon the British Government to take early steps to establish a fully responsible government in India in accordance with the principle of self determination.

The Sikhs formed the All India Sikh League as a representative body of the Panth for political action. The League held its first session in December 1919 at Amritsar simultaneously with the Congress annual convention. The honouring of Brigadier-General Dyer by the priests of Sri Darbar Sahib, Amritsar, led to the intensification of the demand for reforming management of Sikh shrines already being voiced by societies such as the Khalsa Diwan Majha and Central Majha Khalsa Diwan. This resulted in the launching of what came to be known as the Gurdwara Reform movement, 1920-25. Some Sikh servicemen, resenting the policy of non-violence adopted by the leaders of the Akali movement, resigned from the army and constituted thc nucleus of an anti-British terrorist group known as Babar Akalis.

The site, Jallianvala Bagh became a national place of pilgrimage. Soon after the tragic happenings of the Baisakhi day, 1919, a committee was formed with Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya as president to raise a befitting memorial to perpetuate the memory of the martyrs. The Bagh was acquired by the nation on 1 August 1920 at a cost of 5,60,472 rupees but the actual construction of the memorial had to wait until after Independence. The monument, befittingly named the Flame of Liberty, build at a cost of 9,25,000 rupees, was inaugurated by Dr Rajendra Prasad, the first President of the Republic of India, on 13 April 1961. The central 30-ft high pylon, a four-sided tapering stature of red stone standing in the midst of a shallow tank, is built with 300 slabs with Ashoka Chakra, the national emblem, carsed on them. A stone lantern stands at each corner of the tank. On all four sides of the pylon the words, In memory of martyrs, 13 April 1919, has been inscribed in Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English. A semi-circular verandah skirting a children’s swimming pool near the main entrance to the Bagh marks the spot where General Dyer’s soldiers took position to fire at the gathering.