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Jallianwala Bagh continues to haunt even after 100 years

Be that as it may, the massacre ironically gave tremendous impetus to the Indian independence movement.

It is raining anniversaries in India this year. Mohandas Karamchand ("Mahatma") Gandhi, the main moving spirit and driving force for India's struggle for independence from British rule, was born in Porbandar, Gujarat, 150 years ago. He was an apostle of non-violence and profoundly influenced South Africa's Nelson Mandela and US civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Then, the founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak, was born in 1469, five hundred and fifty years ago. A contentious corridor, linking the place where he was born (in the Indian State of Punjab) with the Gurdwara (Sikh temple) in Pakistan, where he spent the last years of his life, is being presently constructed by India and Pakistan. It will take hundreds of thousands of Sikh pilgrims from India to Pakistan over the heavily guarded border. There are serious security concerns on both sides that are currently being addressed, before the mass pilgrimage begins.
These two anniversaries relate to two outstanding and uplifting individuals - Mahatma Gandhi and Guru Nanak. The third anniversary commemorates an event, a ghastly and tragic one, that dramatically changed the course of history in the Indian sub-continent - the Jallianwala Bagh (garden) Massacre, as it is popularly called, of April 13, 1919.
First, a word on the context of that event.
World War 1 (1914-1918) had just come to an end. As many as 355,000 soldiers, mainly from undivided Punjab, had been enlisted and fought in the British army. They covered themselves with glory, winning many battle honours. But now they had been demobbed, were without jobs, and restless. There had also been a crop failure in Punjab and food prices had sky-rocketed. The independence movement, which had been virtually dormant during the four years of war, had started to pick up steam. Hence, Punjab was in ferment. One of its two main cities, Amritsar, where the most revered shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple was located, was agitated. Near the Golden Temple was Jallianwala Bagh, a large quadrilateral park, surrounded by high walls and with a narrow alleyway leading to it. April 13 was "Baisakhi", a festive day in Punjab for Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. Though the British administration had passed a law banning public gatherings, the several thousand men, women and children in the park, thought nothing of it.
But one man didn't: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer. He had been sent to Amritsar with instructions to be tough. A few days earlier, about 20 people, including some Britishers, had been killed when a peaceful strike had turned violent. Dyer decided on a merciless show of force to assert British authority. Leading 50 soldiers, armed with lethal .303 Lee-Enfield bolt action rifles, down the alleyway into the park, he ordered them to spread out and shoot to kill on the unsuspecting crowd. A total of 1,650 bullets were fired in ten minutes, until the ammunition ran out. Almost all the bullets found their mark.
The tragic event is captured in detail in Attenborough's superb film, Gandhi. There are no definite statistics on how many people died that fateful day but many of the wounded were left to bleed to death. The estimates vary from 378, the British official figure which, needless to say, plays down the tragedy, to around 1,000, taking into account the 1,650 rounds that were fired. Writer Kishwar Desai, after painstaking research, has come to a figure of 547 confirmed killed.
Be that as it may, the massacre ironically gave tremendous impetus to the Indian independence movement. There was revulsion even in Britain, with arch-imperialist Winston Churchill condemning General Dyer's action. But by all accounts, Dyer was unrepentant. He received a large sum of money from donations given by his admirers and the Mahant, or chief priest, of the Golden Temple, rewarded him with a Siropa (scarf given as a badge of honour) and baptised him as an honorary Sikh! In fact, this fawning, servile gesture set in motion a movement to reform the administration of Sikh temples.
General Dyer died a peaceful death in his English country home. But another man who had a similar sounding name, Sir Michael O'Dwyer, did not. He was the Governor of Punjab at the time of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. Udham Singh, a revolutionary, came to England and tracked him down. At a meeting of the East Indian Association at London's Caxton Hall, he fired several shots. One of them killed O'Dwyer, while the other bullets wounded two Lords with Indian connections. Udham Singh's murder trial lasted just two days and on July 31, 1940, he was hanged in London's Pentonville Prison. Though he may have not killed the main culprit of the massacre, Udham Singh had extracted a kind of "revenge" for what US President Franklin D Roosevelt, referring to the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbour, memorably called, "A date that will live in Infamy."
Rahul Singh is a former Editor of Khaleej Times.