Unmasking British rule in India

Jallianwala Bagh, 1919: The Real Story:Kishwar DesaiWestland, Rs 699, 280 pages

The ghosts of the 1857 revolt haunted the British for decades afterwards, prompting them to follow increasingly repressive policies towards their Indian subjects. The Jalianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 was the tragic outcome of this historical force, encouraging a British General, Reginald Dyer, born and raised in India, to order his troops to fire on unarmed protestors, resulting in the deaths of killing and injuries over a thousand men, women and children. 
 

That protest on that fateful April day one hundred years ago was part of a nationwide movement launched by Mahatma Gandhi to protest the draconian Rowlatt Acts of February 1919 passed by the British. The Rowlatt Acts proposed to permit, among other things, certain cases to be tried without juries and the internment of suspects without trial.  In Jallianwala Bagh, 1919: The Real Story Kishwar Desai points out that the Rowlatt committee said the laws were necessary to “overthrow by force, British rule”. Almost all Indians resented it, and the impact of Gandhi’s call was felt in Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Amritsar and other towns of Punjab where Hindus and Muslims unitedly marched on the streets and traders closed their shops. Amritsar, however, was the epicentre of the protest because that is where Lala Lajpat Rai and Saifuddin Kitchlew called public meetings. From April 9 to 15, 1919, events in Amritsar were the focus of the attentions of General Dyer and Punjab Lt. Governor Michael O’Dwyer, which led to the imposition of martial law from April to June 1919. 

Ms Desai has built her well-documented narrative in six chapters and marshalled evidence from the British-appointed Hunter Committee inquiry into the massacre and the inquiry committee appointed by the Indian National Congress. Her contention that the colonial rulers’ response to the events leading to the massacre was disproportionate. The ground situation did not warrant targeting of defenceless people by the armed forces. As she points out, “For six weeks or more, as long as martial law was imposed, the people of Punjab became slaves who had to accept every whim of their masters.” It was a “regime of terror” and “the discomfort and humiliation aside, denigrating remarks and physical abuse were also meted out by the British soldiers posted there”. 
 

If anything underlined the innate racism of the British it was the “punishments” for those responsible for the massacre. In the chapter titled “The Fancy Punishments”, the author quotes the Lt. Governor’s statement of April 21, 1919, as an example: “I think our prompt action in dominating Lahore and Amritsar by our overwhelming military force…paralysed the movement before it had time to spread.” The fact that no movement to overthrow the British existed was ignored. As for General Dyer, that unrepentant and ruthless defender of the Raj, observed that, “For me, the battlefield of France or Amritsar is the same”. 

Since the British colonial rulers did not inflict any punishment on their “loyalist”, a Punjabi, Uddham Singh, decided to mete out the ultimate victims’ justice, assassinating O’Dwyer on 13 March 1940. O’ Dwyer had a lingering idea of the injustice of his actions. After a meeting with him, Secretary of State Edwin Montague observed that, “O’Dwyer frankly wanted… that the government of India may protect him against the inhabitants of Punjab”. 

Looking at the evidence a hundred years on, it is difficult to escape the reality that Punjab had been enslaved by a group of men led by O’Dwyer who believed that the natives were incapable of self-rule or entitled to a voice. Anyone who challenged the system had to be wiped out. General Dyer in a statement to the General Staff on 25 August, 1919, said,  “I had the choice of carrying out a very distasteful and horrible duty or of neglecting to do my duty, of suppressing disorder or of becoming responsible for further bloodshed.” What a defence by a loyalist of the Raj! Where was rebellion? 

The Hunter Committee told British Parliament in 1920: “It appears that General Dyer, as soon as he heard about the contemplated meeting, made up his mind to go there with troops and fire” because they had “defied his authority by assembling”. The larger question is: Was the ‘massacre’ the response of individual Raj loyalist or it was part of the whole strategy of the Raj to keep control over the colony and suppress any protest against its rule? The author’s sound judgement is that “the massacre was a carefully planned one and not spontaneous”. 

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 13, 1919, reverberated throughout India, as the information trickled out from under the tentacles of martial law. It proved the turning point of British rule in India and has, therefore, attracted the attention of many historians and scholars. This important study should be read with the larger historical context of colonialism in mind and not simply an account of one tragic episode in India’s colonial history. Ms Desai’s narrative leads to one potent conclusion: that the British Raj in India was as ruthless and cruel as any other colonisers in Africa, Latin America or other Asian countries. The most important message of this book is targeted at that section of the Indian elite that maintains that Gandhi’s non-violence and Satyagraha movements succeeded because the British, unlike colonisers elsewhere, were tolerant of protest.