Amritsar 1919
Page 27
During the days and weeks immediately following the massacre, there was little actual information of how many people had been present at Jallianwala Bagh and how many had been shot among either the British or the local residents of Amritsar. If exact information was unavailable, however, it had very quickly become clear that the casualties were extensive. The police, and the eyewitnesses at the time described a crowd of anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 people, while survivors reported having seen between 400 and 2,000 dead and wounded in the Bagh.28 These numbers were little more than impressionistic and rough estimates based on individual experiences and hearsay, yet they gave some indication of the sheer scale of the massacre. Among the Europeans in Amritsar, at the time, the rumour was indeed that upwards of 1,000 had been killed.29 Just five days after the shooting, Gerard thus wrote in a letter that there had been over 20,000 people gathered and that the killed were estimated at 1,042.30 At Lahore, O’Dwyer’s secretary Thompson was informed by a colleague, who had visited Jallianwala Bagh on 20 April, that it was likely that 800 had been killed, but also that others put the number as high as 1,800. None of these estimates were ever reported to either the Indian Government or to Montagu and the press.31 While it would be an exaggeration to describe the aftermath of the events of 13 April as a deliberate cover-up, there can be no doubt that O’Dwyer and other officials in the Punjab Government deliberately chose not to pass on those estimates that were substantially greater than the 200 reported in the press. The fact was that neither Dyer nor Irving found it necessary to make any inquiries into the death toll, and the authorities could thus with some justification claim that they did not know for sure how many had been killed or wounded at Jallianwala Bagh.
With more than a little poetic licence, Dyer’s biographer was later to describe the moment that the news of the massacre spread across Punjab:
With these flashes, the storm subsided and passed, and the strong wind before which it was driven was the news of the Jallianwala Bagh. The report of that affair spread with an extraordinary rapidity. Thus at one point on the railway line a mob about to loot a railway train which they had derailed were stopped by the approach of another railway train from the direction of Amritsar with shouts from the Indian passengers, ‘Beware, the Sahibs are shooting’, at which words the rebels suddenly went, and the British on the train which had been stopped were left marvelling at their escape.32
This was indeed the general impression and O’Dwyer, and with him many others, insisted that Dyer’s decisive action crushed a rebellion and prevented wider bloodshed.33 According to Irving, the effect of the firing at Jallianwala Bagh was ‘electric’:
The whole rebellion collapsed. Not only the mob that was fired upon natur-ally dispersed and all trouble ceased in the city of Amritsar, but it was felt throughout the district. One of the reasons why there had been a danger was that the people out in the district thought for some reason or other that the arm of Government was paralysed. The inaction of the police when the National Bank was burned lent some colour to that belief and there was an idea that Government could do nothing, and this came as a disillusionment.34
Irving’s enthusiastic assessment of the massacre’s efficacy conveniently ignored the fact that there had been no trouble in Amritsar at the time of the massacre. While there was indisputably widespread unrest throughout Punjab, and in many instances arson and killings, there was no large-scale rebellion, let alone a recurrence of the ‘Mutiny’. At no point during the crisis had Indian troops turned against their officers and at no point during the riots had Indians used anything but sticks and stones as weapons to attack the edifice of the Raj.
If the rebellion Dyer had crushed was imaginary, the effect of the shooting on 13 April on the local residents of Amritsar certainly was not. ‘From that day onwards, there was nothing but terror in the city,’ the lawyer Pandit Rajendra Misra noted. ‘The city seemed to be all desolate and deserted.’35 In Amritsar and the surrounding villages, people were reeling from grief and the shock of the massacre. ‘People were panic-stricken,’ one resident noted, while another described how ‘After the 13th the people were so terrified that they did not even talk to each other.’36 In the village of Majitha, 11 miles from Amritsar, the local headman encountered some villagers who had gone to see the Baisakhi fair: ‘They informed me that they constituted a party of ten and they were in the vicinity of the garden of the Jallianwala Bagh and 8 of them had returned and there was no news about the remaining two. It was quite clear that they had been frightened by the firing and they could not talk properly because they were so frightened.’37
While the funerals were still ongoing in the afternoon of 14 April, Dyer called a meeting of all the local leaders, magistrates and men of influence at the Town Hall. There were more than 100 people gathered in the public library hall and, around 5pm, Dyer and Irving and some of the other officials arrived, as Girdhari Lal described: ‘He rushed into the room, followed by others, all exceedingly angry, and he made a speech in Urdu, standing, with the result that all of us had to stand.’38 The gathered men were now subjected to a threatening tirade from a visibly agitated Dyer:
You people know well that I am a soldier and a military man, you want war or peace? And if you wish for war, the Government is prepared for war. And if you want peace, then obey my orders, and open all your shops, else I will shoot. For me the battlefield of France or Amritsar is the same. I am a military man and will go straight, neither shall I move to the right nor to the left. Speak up, if you want war. In case there is to be peace, my order is to open all shops at once. You people talk against the government, and persons educated at Germany and Bengal talk sedition. I shall uproot these all. Obey orders. I do not wish to hear anything else. I have served in the military for over 30 years. I understand the Indian sepoys and Sikh people very well. You will have to observe peace, otherwise the shops will be opened perforce with rifles. You must inform me of the badmashes. I will shoot them. Obey my orders and open shops, and speak up if you want war.39
Coming less than twenty-four hours after one of the worst massacres in the history of British rule in India, this was a remarkable speech for what it revealed of Dyer’s state of mind. Despite the fact that there had been no unrest in the city since 10 April, before Dyer even arrived, the British at Amritsar felt cornered and in the midst of what they perceived as a desperate struggle for their very survival. Although Dyer invoked the authority of his long experience and deep knowledge of India, he had been reduced to uttering crude threats of violence, rather than calmly asserting the authority and prestige of the Raj as his own colonial ethos dictated. It was furthermore a singularly misguided message that Dyer and the others delivered, as there was most likely not a single person in the gathering at the Town Hall who had actively participated in the earlier riots, or anyone who had played a leading role in the Rowlatt protests. Dyer and his retinue of infuriated, but frightened colonial officials were, in other words, threatening the wrong people. In Dyer’s view, however, the entire population of Amritsar had risen in rebellion and were all responsible for the violence and unrest.
Irving spoke afterwards, delivering much the same message ‘in a bitter tone’ and in broken Punjabi, including the patronising admonition ‘The Government is very angry with you.’40 The end result was that the local leaders promised to ensure shops were opened immediately, thus effectively ending the hartal. Briggs noted in the situation report written immediately after the meeting that ‘Influential inhabitants who were present promised to obey the Sarkar’ and ‘so long as the behaviour of the inhabitants is good, water will be allowed them from the main’.41 This was colonial governance in the hallowed tradition of despotic paternalism. The spirit of reform and the progressive language of self-governance seemed but a distant prospect and yet worse was to come.
On 15 April, martial law was declared at Amritsar.42 While Dyer had been preparing his strike force at Ram Bagh on 13 April, the Punjab Government had submitted a formal request to t
he Government of India for emergency measures to be invoked, but formal approval only came through two days later.43 Martial law would usually be declared during a crisis when civil authority, and civil courts, had ceased to function, as had been the case during the uprising in 1857. The intended purpose for martial law in Punjab in 1919, where the civil administration was still in place and fully functioning, however, was rather to suspend the civil courts and replace them with martial law tribunals to enable the summary persecution of ‘rebels’. ‘Martial law was really wanted,’ Kitchin later admitted, ‘not to recover control for this had already been done by the rifles of the troops, but to prevent the spread of the infection.’44 That martial law was primarily intended to facilitate arrests and speedy trials was further indicated by the unusual request from O’Dwyer that it be backdated to 30 March: ‘We considered we were to set up a special machinery to deal with rebellion and rebellious people, and all this trouble at Amritsar was due to Dr. Kitchlew and Satyapal, and they had to be dealt with by judicial machinery.’45 Since the two main ‘agitators’ had been away from Amritsar on 10 April, the Punjab administration instead argued that the conspiracy had begun with the hartal on 30 March and, by backdating martial law, all the alleged leaders of the rebellion could be tried through same process. At Amritsar, Dyer remained in command while the practical administration of martial law would be in the hands of the Provost Marshal, Major S.R. Shirley. The establishment of martial law courts in Amritsar would enable the summary punishment of minor cases, though all capital crimes would have to be deferred to the Martial Law Commission in Lahore. Under martial law, furthermore, it would be far easier to continue the policy of preventing ‘troublesome’ Indian politicians or journalists from entering Punjab, and the British could thus more easily censor the press and control the flow of information.
While martial law was formally invoked in Amritsar on 15 April, it was not till four days later, on the 19th, that the administrative practicalities had been completed, and the different orders proclaimed to the residents of the city.46 In certain respects, this was little more than a technical detail, since Dyer and the emergency administration in Amritsar had been operating largely outside the bounds of any legal framework since the evening of 10 April. The difference was that now they could do so with impunity, free from any sort of legal repercussions. As with the disruption of the electricity and water supply, martial law did not distinguish between the guilty and the innocent, but assumed the form of collective punishment. Dyer was quite clear on this issue:
Amritsar had behaved very badly and I think most of the inhabitants of Amritsar either gave assistance or were only waiting to see what was going to happen apparently. At any rate, they did not offer to help until after the firing; and if they suffered a little under martial law . . .47
The regime of indiscriminate and summary punishment that was implemented under martial law in the aftermath of the massacre was later described by Girdhari Lal:
The authorities adopted various devious methods to strike terror in the hearts of the people. All the lawyers of the town were made special constables, insulted and abused, and made to witness public flogging and to carry furniture like ordinary coolies. All persons in the city were made to salaam every Englishman. Disobedience to this resulted in arrest and detention in the lock-up. Some were ordered to stand in the sun for hours in the hot season, and others made to learn salaaming by practising it for some time. Handcuffing of respectable persons was the order of the day.48
Many of these ‘fanciful punishments’ served no other purpose than to intimidate the local population and allow the British to reassert their authority through acts of both physical and symbolic humiliation.49 The order for Indians to salaam or make a visible display of respect to all Europeans they encountered in public was perhaps the most innocuous rule of the time, but one that reasserted the racialised hierarchy of the colonial world most forcefully. At Amritsar, local residents who failed, or were too slow, to show sufficient respect to British officers were taken to the Ram Bagh and forced to practise salaaming for hours before being released with a warning.50 Due respect for the white sahibs, and by extension to British rule, was thus literally being drilled into Indians as if they were children. When describing the punishment for which he was responsible at Amritsar, Dyer frequently resorted to the language of the schoolmaster and explicitly stated that ‘I want to punish the naughty boy.’51 The bitter irony of this particular order was that during the Rowlatt agitation just a few weeks earlier, one of the rumours in circulation was that under the new legislation ‘anyone who does not salaam a policeman will be arrested’.52 What people had feared from the Rowlatt Act thus came to pass during martial law.
Martial law, furthermore, gave the CID and the police a free hand to make sweeping house searches and arrests. No warrants were prepared, and people were simply arrested on the assumption that evidence would subsequently be discovered.53 Although this irregular procedure was likely to lead to abuse and corruption, it produced results with more than 533 individuals being taken into custody.54 Girdhari Lal described how these police ‘investigations’ affected the local residents:
The police began to arrest people from 12th April, as far I remember. There was no break after that, and people in every sphere of life were arrested from day to day, while employed peacefully in their occupations. No charge was stated, those suspected of the alleged ‘rebellion or waging war’ were taken by force from their houses, handcuffed at once, and put into the lock-up for days and months without being informed what they were accused of, and no opportunity was ever allowed them to see or consult friends or relations.55
During the enquiry into the attack on the Municipal Female Hospital, for instance, Mrs Easdon wrongly accused one of her Indian neighbours, Mohammed Amin, as having been part of the mob. The police subsequently tried to get Easdon’s assistant, Miss Benjamin, to corroborate that accusation by, in turn, threatening and tempting her. Benjamin later described her encounter with the police:
A few days after, when the enquiry was going on, I was taken to the Kotwali on two occasions. I was asked to say that I had seen Mohammed Amin in the crowd. As I said that that was not the truth, Mr. Plomer threatened to send me to jail. I told him whatever I knew, but I refused to give false evidence. They also tempted me with a reward from the Government, if I supported the story of Mrs. Easdon regarding the presence of Mohammed Amin. I refused again.56
After spending several months in prison, Mohammed Amin was eventually acquitted. His son, who was also accused in the case, was initially given a death-sentence, which was later commuted to five years’ imprisonment.57 Mrs Easdon appears to have implicated Amin and his son simply because they had failed to come to her aid on 10 April. During the investigation, Benjamin may have been considered particularly susceptible to this form of coercion since she was Eurasian, like Plomer himself. What does seem clear is that Benjamin’s gender and ethnicity ultimately protected her from the extreme brutality that was visited on the dozens of Indian men who were swept up by the police during the martial law period.
Moulvi Gholam Jilani, a local imam who had taken part in organising the Ram Naumi festivities, and later survived the massacre, was first taken to the kotwali on 16 April and told he had to ‘try and get rich and prominent persons arrested’.58 He was then allowed to leave but was promptly rearrested three days later and put in the lock-up. Subsequently, Jilani was to be transferred to the police lines where Jowahar Lal of the CID would interrogate him, but the prisoner was taken separately in a carriage along with three police officers:
They began to beat me without saying anything. They beat me till I passed urine. Then they caused my trousers to be put off, and beat me severely with shoes and a cane. I cried out, and asked what they wanted from me. Upon this, I was abused and beaten again, and asked to become ‘All right.’ I told them I did not understand what they wanted. [. . .] The Sub-Inspector shook me by the beard, and said that I must name S
aif-uddin Kitchlew, Bashir, Dr Satyapal and Badrul Islam and others, if I wanted to be released. I said, I was not acquainted with any one of these persons, although I had known some of them by sight. At this, they beat me again, till I became senseless.59
At the police barracks, Jilani was further beaten and one of the constables raped him with a stick. At the time some of his friends were waiting outside to provide bail for his release, and they later described what they saw and heard: ‘Shortly after, Gholam Jilani was taken inside the Police Barrack and then we heard his heart-rending cries [. . .] About an hour after, Gholam Jilani was brought out. We all saw his injuries. His clothes were full of blood. He could not walk. He was dragged, put in a carriage and taken to the Kotwali.’60 Another man, Khair Din, who received a similar treatment from the police at Amritsar later died from his injuries.61 Jilani was beaten and abused by the police for several weeks before he was finally released on bail. He was never convicted of any crime.