Is it finally time for an apology for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre?
Most of the world has forgotten about the importance, scale and magnitude of the bloody Amritsar Massacre, or at best, they see it as distant history, an event as remote as the Treaty of Versailles, signed in the same year. But for those Indians who have any lineage threaded through the Punjab or India as a whole, or for anybody who finds the brutality of the era of the British Raj contemptible as a human being, it is a constant reminder that colonialism never really cared for human life when there was an overriding lesson to be taught; innocent casualties of violence be damned when profit is in sight.
Why then is it such a moot point to expect a sincere, humble apology-words not deeds- for what happened that afternoon, when even Winston Churchill (no friend to India) can bring himself to admit it was an event of bloodletting without precedent? Wouldn’t 2019 be a good time to apologise for this terrible act, marking the 100th anniversary of this shameful chapter in history?
The compelling need for a formal apology
The reason it is important is that if an apology is not forthcoming in relation to such an act of abject brutality, then history will always remember the events of Sunday, April 13, 1919 in Amritsar as a pejorative footnote. If there is no apology then the event will be remembered as a flaky ‘fake news’ item many years from now that overstates the number of those who died, that gets in the way of a convenient image of the British Raj as a rather convivial lot who were forced to act against violent natives, who were compelled to put down a “rebellion” of unarmed gatherers in order to ‘save’ the Raj.
The truth is that those collected there in the Bagh (including families sheltering from the hot sun, merchants, children, women, thousands celebrating the auspicious occasion of Baisakhi) that fateful afternoon stood no chance in the face of overzealous soldiers (almost all of whom were not even British) who were determined to exhaust their ammunition and please their Sahib commander. These gatherers had no chance to overcome the temper of one Brigadier Reginald ‘Rex’ Dyer, who was determined to silence any kind of protest with the barrels of his (many) guns, to teach a lesson that would not be forgotten.
Dyer teaches a lesson the natives will never forget.
It’s 5.15pm in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in the Punjab when the open-topped motorcar pulls up near the seven-acre area of waste ground where this act of bloodlust was acted out. There’s no opportunity to bring in a machine gun equipped armoured car due to the narrowness of the street. But that won’t get in the way because Dyer is convinced that the poets, speechmakers and ‘violent rebels’ gathered there need to be a taught a lesson and if they die in the process, so be it. It’s not relevant that they are a predominately peaceful crowd, that there are local men, women and even children there who are trying to get out of the burning Punjab sun and have no inclination to hear Gandhian speeches about non-violence.
Apparently, it’s not even required to tell them to disperse immediately lest they incur the blazing wrath of gunfire and immediate violence. No, to Dyer and his solders, it was more important to fire first, to ‘fire well’, and to walk away from the carnage without so much as tending to the dying and the wounded. The number of dead ranged anywhere from the hundreds to the thousands; and that does not include those who died much later of their wounds from gangrene and did not even make official counts (as families were terrified of admitting that the individual concerned was even at the meeting, lest they felt the repercussions).
What were the Indian and Gurkha troops thinking when they loaded their weapons and spent their ammunition? They were interested in following orders and the order was not to hurt, it was to maim, to kill, to educate, because that’s what Dyer-and the British Raj-felt had to be done that afternoon. No apologies, no warning needed, maximum casualties. Jolly good show.
The apologists have nothing but the slenderest of arguments
Apologists for the vicious British Empire like to say that the number killed that day is grossly exaggerated, that Dyer was legitimate in feeling that a gathering of political propagandists hell-bent on overthrowing the British had deliberately collected there to lay down their violent plans and to act on them forthwith. Yet not one of them had so much as a gun to make him tremble in his boots and he saw no real discernible threat.
If the apology is not for the scale of brutality itself, then what about the blasé revisionism that has been trotted out ever since 1919? The fact that it couldn’t have been thousands killed, even though on Baisakhi there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the Bagh due to its location relative to the Golden Temple and the markets? The fact that Dyer felt compelled to act because his innumerable guns, weapons and formal battle training were no match for gatherers with…sticks and stones?
The apology is to ensure that future generations of Indians and anyone horrified by the events of that day never forget its magnitude, that this was exactly the kind of collective punishment regularly meted out by the British Raj in India. That their railways, law and order meant nothing when it was time to teach the natives a lesson and give them a bloody good hiding.
More than a mere historical footnote
It’s to ensure that certain canards are not expeditiously spread into the ether, nonsense such as that the organisers of the event irresponsibly and, even suicidally went ahead with their meeting despite notification of a verbal ban of gatherings (which was not distributed as widely as apologists contend nor even heard by the thousands who did not even live in Amritsar and were there on pilgrimage) putting their agenda before people’s lives.
I’m not alone in feeling that the psyche of that massacre continues to be engrained in my mind, in the core of my heart, in the deepest genes of my body, that I still get horrified to learn that a respected general fired at innocent, unarmed Indians, then couldn’t even be bothered to deal with those who had to jump into a well to protect themselves and lay there to die, or minimise the number of those bodies chopped down as they scattered for blocked off exits. That there was a 9-year-old boy and an 80 year old man there who posed no threat to him or the British Raj seemed an inconvenience.
And how can a formal apology not be required when the massacre has inordinately been described in history as ‘an unforgivable atrocity’, ‘state terrorism’, ‘a heinous crime’ and ‘the biggest and bloodiest blot on the generally benign record of British rule in India’.
The turning point in the freedom struggle
Time will tell, we have one year to push for an apology but even if fails then at least schools and curriculums should reflect what the British Raj was really all about, then even that would be considered a victory. If history reflects actuality and is placed squarely in context, then a formal apology would underline the significance of that bloody afternoon once and for all; it was after all a turning point in the freedom struggle, and signified the beginning of the end of the British Empire in India.
Saurav Dutt is the author of the forthcoming book “Garden of Bullets: The Jallianwalah Bagh Massacre” released on the 100th anniversary of the atrocity in April 2019. To follow the project, please follow @sd_saurav on Twitter.
