Remembering the Jallianwala Bagh, Gandhi, Churchill and Jinnah

Reviewing positions of three key players on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre - the watershed event of India’s independence.

The following are excerpts from Arthur Herman’s book “Gandhi and Churchill�. I tried to find more on Jinnah’s position but my limited research resulted in nothing more.

On April 10 Dyer had marched his brigade had marched his brigade of English, Pathan and Baluchi troops to Amritsar. He found the city in chaos, with crowds burning buildings and tearing up railway tracks in order to prevent help from arriving. On the thirteenth Dyer entered the city center with a convoy of armored cars, his troops following. With him was Amritsar’s town crier. At each intersection the crier read aloud in English and Urdu Dyer’s order banning all large public gatherings, followed by explanations in Punjabi and Hindi. A large bass drum drew the crowds to hear the order.

The troop’s march through Amritsar took four and a half hours. When Dyer returned to his temporary head quarters, he learned that a demonstration was under ways in the enclosed square adjoining the Sikhs’ holiest site, the Golden Temple. Furious at this deliberate violation of his order, Dyer led a detachment of ninety Baluchis and Ghurkhas and two armored cars down the narrow street to the square, the Jallianwala Bagh, where a crowd of several thousand had gathered to hear pro-Gandhi speakers.

Dyer barked the order the order to open fire. One of his men said afterward that “the whole crowd seemed to sink to the ground in a flutter of white garments,� as the Gurkhas and the Baluchis blazed away. Men, women, and children screamed and scrambled to get away. But they had nowhere to go. The tiny streets leading out became clogged bottlenecks. Almost ten thousand people were trapped in a space, Winston Churchill later pointed out, small than Trafalgar Square – while volley after volley rang out.

For ten minutes Dyer encouraged his soldiers to keep shooting, until bodies carpeted the ground. Then he gave order to cease fire. With military precision he and his men shouldered arms and marched out of the Jallianwala Bagh. The bodies lined the entire wall around the enclosure. In some places, eyewitnesses said, they were ten feet deep. Then for good measure, Dyer ordered every Indian who the spot where the woman had been pulled from her bicycle to be forced to crawl on all fours. He set up a whipping post where any native who refused to crawl would be flogged. He and Governor O’Dwyer then imposed a reign of martial law as harsh as anything since the Mutiny.

The clampdown was so intense that it took several weeks for the news from Amritsar to reach the rest of India. Gandhi did not hear of the massacre until June. At first he could not believe it. Then his first reaction was to blame not the British but the Indians. To the vast majority of others, however, the Jallianwala Bagh and the “crawling order� confirmed the worst view of the most extreme radicals: that British rule in India rested on thing more than race hatred and brutal force.

For millions of educated Indians, the Amritsar massacre left a scar that would never heal. The pain united Indians as never before – or after. All around them the British, supposedly their protectors, not only refused to condemn the atrocities but publicly applauded them.

Then the government offered relatives of the four Europeans murdered in Amritsar 400,000 rupees in compensation, while the relatives of those killed in the Jallianwala Bagh received only 500 rupees per body. Few were paid even that. To add insult to injury, O’Dwyer’s Punjab government also imposed 1,850,000 rupees impost on the province to cover the costs of military operations and martial law. More than any event, Amritsar and its aftermath solidified national support for Indian independence. It did so months before Gandhi became involved. What was needed, he said was a government commission to investigate the events in the Punjab.

Then the Raj’s bureaucratic wheels slowly began to turn. The commission was swallowing whole Dyer and O’Dwyer’s account. The commissioners were inclined to believe the “officer on the spot�, especially a white one. Commission refused to meet the Congress’s condition for cooperation, such as releasing activists who had been jailed under O’Dwyer’s martial law. Congress’s own commission was muddled, and Gandhi stepped forward with his usual energy and organizing skills. He produced a carefully crafted piece of lawyerly analysis. The facts, Gandhi said, had to fit “like bricks …. “making a roadway for you to walk to your goals.�

The evidence led inexorably Gandhi’s conclusions, published in March 1920, that the events in Punjab were “a calculated piece of inhumanity toward utterly innocent and unarmed men, including children and unparalleled for its ferocity in the history of modern British administration.� He blamed viceroy for the “criminal want of imagination� in allowing the death sentences passed under martial law to stand. Congress released this report on March 25, 1920, while the government report came out on May 3, 1920. Gandhi, the commission’s biggest erstwhile fan blasted the report as “an attempt to condone official lawlessness� and “page after page of thinly disguised official whitewash.�

Gandhi had come to another life passage. He convinced himself that he had to end his “splendid isolation� and enter the arena of mainstream Indian politics.

Churchill was the final authority on what to be done to Dyer and O’Dwyer. In private, he said what Dyer had done was nothing less than murder. Churchill could not fire Dyer, but he could get him forcibly retired from the army. Confrontation in the house of commons was set for July 8, 1920 with those who opposed any action against Dyer and O’Dwyer.

“There has not been, I suppose, for many years a case of this kind,� Churchill began, “and which has raised so many grave and wide issues.� He wanted to discuss Dyer case “in a calm spirit, avoiding passion and avoiding attempts to excite prejudice� or race feelings on both sides, because such a case required “a judgment of exceptional seriousness, delicacy and responsibility.� He explained that pushing Dyer into retirement was the mildest form of punishment Dyer could expect, considering what happened. “This is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire,� he called it, “an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands out in singular and sinister isolation.� Every military officer facing a large crowd must make painful decisions, Churchill said, such as whether to fire, not on an enemy, “but on those who are his countrymen, or who are citizens of our common Empire.� Under any circumstance, Churchill said, it was a British Officer’s duty to avoid anything that smacked of frightfulness: “What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorizing not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.� He read loud the testimony of Dyer’s subordinate that “if the road has not been narrow, the machine guns and armored cars would have� been brought to bear as well.

Churchill paused to let the point sink in. Then he continued: “We have to make it absolutely clear, some way or other, that this is not the British way of doing business.� Finally he ended by saying that to wreck that cooperation and goodwill by allowing Dyer’s action to go unpunished or unremarked would be “one of most melancholy events in the history of the world.� What was needed now was to “to keep alive the spirit of comradeship, that sense of utility and progress in cooperation, which must ever ally and bind together the British and Indian peoples.�

Churchill’s speech carried the day. The final vote approving Army Council’s action was 230 to 129. Dyer left the gallery stone faced with his wife in tears. Churchill has raised himself to a new level, Arthur Herman calls it as Churchill’s finest hour.

In India, the effect of Churchill’s speech and house vote was stunned surprise. Nehru called, “It seemed absolutely immoral, indecent, to use public school language, it was height of bad form.�. Gandhi wrote of Dyer “His brutality is unmistakable. His abject and unsoldier-like cowardice is apparent in every line of amazing defense before the Army Council.� Gandhi maintained the greatest crime committed in Amritsar was not even mentioned by Churchill. That was “slow torture, degradation, and emasculation� of the crawling order and the floggings of innocent passerby.� The authors of these deeds “deserve greater condemnation than General Dyer for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The latter only destroyed a few bodies but the others tried to kill the soul of a nation.�

Jinnah called it “physical butchery.�