Amritsar 1919

by Kim Wagner

  During the ensuing, and increasingly bitter, public debate, O’Dwyer accused Montagu of outright dishonesty, insisting that the Secretary of State had been fully apprised of the scale of the massacre as early as May.21 The truth was, however, that O’Dwyer and the Punjab administration had been less than forthright with the information available, and had, in fact, obfuscated the numbers. Montagu had originally been informed that 200 people were estimated to have been killed on 13 April, yet subsequent reports in May and August confusingly made mention of 400–420 killed ‘in and outside Punjab’, rather than in Amritsar specifically.22 The official report submitted to Chelmsford by the Punjab authorities on 11 October simply stated that, following the shooting, ‘the number of casualties were not counted’.23 Despite having personally met with the Secretary of State on at least two occasions during the intervening period, O’Dwyer never actually informed Montagu that there were significantly higher estimates of the casualties at Jallianwala Bagh, nor that the total number of killed and wounded was likely to exceed one thousand.

  Neither Chelmsford nor Montagu had been misleading the press, yet both ended up looking either duplicitous or incompetent. There was a flurry of telegrams back and forth between London, Delhi and Lahore, as Montagu sought to find out how he had been so badly blindsided by the news reports, and he was eventually informed that the final figure was 379.24 Chelmsford nevertheless managed to convince the Secretary of State for India to await the findings of the Hunter Committee before he addressed the matter publicly or decided how to deal with Dyer. It was not till a week later, however, that the Amritsar affair was blown wide open and what Orwell described as the ‘dirty work of Empire’ was fully exposed.25 In the House of Commons on 22 December, after an hour-long debate on Ireland, the radical Labour politician J.C. Wedgwood abruptly got up to discuss the issue of Amritsar. The massacre, he argued, would have long-term ramifications for Britain’s prestige and standing internationally:

  It has destroyed our reputation throughout the world. You know what will happen. All the blackguards in America when they lynch niggers, will say, ‘Oh, you did the same in India.’ When butcheries take place in Russia, whether it be by White or Red Guard, they will say, ‘We never did anything like what you did in India’; and when we tell the Turks, ‘You massacred the Armenians,’ they will say, ‘Yes, we wish we had the chance of getting 5,000 of them together, and then of shooting straight.’ That is the sort of welcome that this will get, and all the decent people in the world will think that England really likes what happened at Amritsar, and that all this sort of thing is English. Really, we know that this sort of thing is the finest Prussianism that ever took place. The Germans never did anything worse in Belgium. This damns us for all time. Whenever we put forward the humanitarian view, we shall have this tale thrown into our teeth.26

  Wedgwood could not know then just how right he was. Just a week before, one of the snapshots taken by the soldiers in the crawling lane was used as inspiration for a cartoon by David Low in The Daily News.27 Entitled ‘Progress to Liberty – Amritsar Style’, the cartoon depicted a Prussian-looking British officer towering over an Indian and an Irishman crawling on the ground, thus representing the shared oppression of imperial subjects.28 And, not long after, the German satirical journal Simplicissimus published the first ever visual representation of the Amritsar Massacre by the artist Eduard Thöny.29 Having spent four years illustrating anti-British propaganda, Thöny depicted mounted British officers and colonial troops in the aftermath of the massacre, posed against an imaginative orientalist background, with the half-naked bodies of dead Indians at their feet. If not exactly accurate, it was nevertheless a striking image which would have brought to mind the imagery and photographs of contemporary pogroms and massacres. These were only the first of many such illustrations, which invariably depicted the British in a negative light.

  The reports emerging from Punjab, piecemeal and fragmented, were particularly galling to a British public conditioned to thinking of colonial violence in terms of German pre-war atrocities in Africa, which had been widely publicised just the year before, or indeed the ‘Red Rubber’ scandal of Belgian Congo a decade earlier. A narrative of British exceptionalism was already well established, not least due the extensive propaganda effort during the war, and the ideals of liberal government and rule of law were very explicitly invoked with reference, and in contrast, to the alleged tyranny of ‘Prussianism’. The unrest in Punjab furthermore coincided with political turmoil and widespread unrest throughout the Empire, which contributed to a growing sense of crisis.30 ‘In no single theatre are we strong enough,’ wrote General Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff: ‘Not in Ireland, nor England, not on the Rhine, not in Constantinople, nor Batoum, nor Egypt, nor Palestine, nor Mesopotamia, nor Persia, nor India.’31

  By early 1920, moreover, the situation in Ireland was steadily deteriorating and would soon turn into an all-out guerrilla war. The debate over Amritsar and the use of military force in Punjab thus became a proxy for the Irish question and it proved virtually impossible for contemporaries to discuss one without the other. Once the British counter-insurgency campaign began in Ireland, the Duke and Duchess of Somerset, for instance, publicly stated that ‘it is a pity we have not a General Dyer in Ireland at the present time, to crush a conspiracy against British rule’.32 When British forces opened fire and killed thirteen civilians during a football match at Croke Park, on the other hand, it was referred to in the press as an ‘Irish Amritsar’.33

  The report of the Punjab Inquiry was completed on 20 February 1920 and published a month later. Apart from the actual report, there were a number of photographs, including portraits of victims from Jallianwala Bagh, while a second volume contained the evidence of more than 800 eyewitnesses who had been interviewed in various parts of Punjab. The report, which was mainly the work of Gandhi and the barrister M.R. Jayakar, had been able to quote from Dyer’s statements made before the Hunter Committee as they had been reported in the Indian press, which provided a stark contrast to the Indian accounts.34

  The main thrust of the report’s critique was aimed squarely at O’Dwyer and the Punjab administration, especially the coercive recruitment practices during the war, which had exacerbated the hardship of the local population. As might be expected, the punishments and trials that had taken place during the imposition of martial law were decried as unjust and tyrannical, and the report called for the repeal of the Rowlatt Act as well as the outright dismissal of both Dyer and O’Dwyer. This was not simply a litany of anti-colonial indictments, however, and Gandhi had explicitly dismissed the rumours that Dyer, with the aid of Hans Raj, had planned to trap and shoot the protesters at Jallianwala Bagh: ‘Much as I would like to discuss the suggested theory as such in our report, I cannot do it unless I have prima facie evidence warranting a discussion.’35 The conclusion of the Punjab Inquiry, as far as the violence in Amritsar was concerned, was nevertheless unequivocal: ‘The Jalleanwala Bagh massacre was a calculated piece of inhumanity towards utterly innocent and unarmed men, including children [. . .] The crawling order and other fancy punishments were unworthy of a civilized administration, and were symptomatic of the moral degradation of their inventors.’36 Although the publication of the report created a stir in India, and especially in the vernacular press, it was, like Tagore’s return of his knighthood, barely noticed in Britain. The Government could also afford to ignore the Congress report as long as the official inquiry was perceived to be fair.

  However, when the seven-volume report of the Hunter Committee was finally completed in early March, any hopes of a convivial resolution to the matter were dashed. By the time the Committee came to write up their findings, the distance between the British and Indian members had become only too apparent. As Setalvad described it:

  As regards the condemnation of the Jallianwala firing, the crawling order and other oppressive measures under the Martial Law administration, the European and Indian members were
agreed except that the Indian Members took a much graver view than the one taken by the European members which was somewhat halting and apologetic. The discussions which were on occasions heated led to some unpleasantness, particularly because of the intolerant attitude adopted by Lord Hunter towards any difference of opinion. During one of the discussions I had with Lord Hunter, he lost his temper and said ‘You people (meaning myself and my Indian colleagues) want to drive the British out of the country.’ This naturally annoyed me very much and I said: ‘It is perfectly legitimate for Indians to wish to be free of foreign rule and Indian independence can be accomplished by mutual understanding and goodwill. The driving out process will only become necessary if the British are represented in this country by people as short-sighted and intolerant as yourself.’ After this, though under the same roof, we, the Indian members, ceased to talk to Lord Hunter.37

  The end result was that the three Indian members, J. Narayan, C.H. Setalvad and Sultan Ahmed Khan, broke with the rest of the Hunter Committee and submitted a minority report. The majority report, signed off by Hunter and the three other British members, was by no means uncritical, though it reserved its criticism almost exclusively for Dyer:

  The action taken by General Dyer has also been described by others as having saved the situation in the Punjab and having averted a rebellion on a scale similar to the Mutiny. It does not, however, appear to us possible to draw this conclusion, particularly in view of the fact that it is not proved that a conspiracy to overthrow British power had been formed prior to the outbreaks.38

  Dyer’s claim about the need for making a striking example was thus explicitly rejected as ‘a mistaken concept of his duty’, while the crawling order was also denounced as likely to cause ‘bitterness and racial ill-feeling’. The Punjab administration, on the other hand, received only the mildest rebuke, and, by focusing on Dyer, as well as a few isolated episodes that were clearly indefensible, the majority report effectively exonerated O’Dwyer.39

  It was this very tactical criticism, and selective accountability, that so angered the Indian members of the inquiry and ultimately caused their dissent. While the two reports of the Hunter Committee were based on the same mat--erial, and shared some findings, they ultimately reached very different conclusions. The minority report went even further than the Punjab Inquiry in its condemnation of Dyer and the suppression of the unrest in Punjab:

  General Dyer wanted by his action at Jallianwala Bagh to create a ‘wide impression’ and ‘a great moral effect’. We have no doubt that he did succeed in creating a very wide impression and a great moral effect, but of a character quite opposite to the one he intended. The story of this indiscriminate killing of innocent people not engaged in committing any acts of violence, but assembled in a meeting, has undoubtedly produced such a deep impression throughout the length and breadth of the country, so prejudicial to the British Government that it would take a good deal and a long time to rub it out. The action of General Dyer, as well as some acts of the martial law administration [. . .] have been compared to the acts of ‘frightfulness’ committed by some of the German military commanders during the war in Belgium and France.

  It is pleaded that General Dyer honestly believed that what he was doing was right. This cannot avail him, if he was clearly wrong in his notions of what was right and what was wrong; and the plea of military necessity is the plea that has always been advanced in justification of the Prussian atrocities. General Dyer thought that he had crushed the rebellion, and Sir Michael O’Dwyer was of the same view. There was no rebellion which required to be crushed. We feel that General Dyer, by adopting an inhuman and un-British method of dealing with subjects of His Majesty the King-Emperor, has done great disservice to the interest of British rule in India. This aspect it was not possible for the people of the mentality of General Dyer to realise.40

  There was never to be a more poignant critique from official circles, and even if this was only the conclusion of the minority report, it was still part of the official inquiry.

  When the Hunter Committee split along racial lines, the inquiry lost much of its legitimacy and put the Government in a difficult situation. Without any Indian members subscribing to the majority report, Chelmsford and Montagu had to take account of the minority report in order to maintain the claim that this was a genuinely open inquiry and not just an official whitewash.41 Although the Hunter Committee had thus turned out to be both contentious and divisive, its findings were conclusive on the point of Dyer’s actions and, having read the reports, Chelmsford wrote to Montagu: ‘I cannot contemplate the retention of a man of his mentality and with his record.’42 The members of the Viceroy’s Council agreed, as Sir William Vincent put it: ‘The deliberate conclusion at which I have arrived is that in acting as he did he went beyond any reasonable requirement of the case, he showed a disregard for human life, a misconception of his duty and his action was such that it would be unwise to allow him to continue to hold the responsible position which he is now occupying.’43

  It was now incumbent upon Chelmsford to take some form of action against Dyer, also in part to assuage Indian opinion. Yet any measure that might be perceived as politically motivated would cause an outcry from among British officials and Anglo-Indians, as well as Conservatives back home. At this point, Dyer was on long-term sick leave at Jullundur, due to failing health and a severe case of malaria, and he had just been recommended for six months’ sick leave to England.44 Chelmsford wanted to ensure the matter was dealt with before Dyer departed and requested the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Charles Monro, to ‘take the appropriate action’.45 The military establishment, including Lieutenant-General Sir Havelock Hudson, the Adjutant-General in India, had so far been among the strongest supporters of Dyer. In light of the Hunter Committee’s findings, which Chelmsford had formally accepted, it would nevertheless be inconceivable for the Commander-in-Chief to go against the Government’s decision. Dyer had become a liability, not because of his actions as much as the manner in which he had sought to justify them, and Monro no longer felt compelled to protect the disgraced officer.46 Dyer was thus hastily summoned to Delhi where he was informed by the Commander-in-Chief, that he would have to resign his command and that he would receive no further appointment in India. The ailing General had no choice but to comply and on 27 March, he submitted his resignation letter:

  Sir, I have the honour to state that during my recent visit to Delhi the Adjutant-General in India informed me that, owing to the opinion expressed by the Hunter Commission regarding my action at Amritsar during April 1919, it was necessary for me to resign my appointment as Brigadier-General Commanding the 5th Infantry Brigade. Accordingly I hereby ask that I be relieved of that appointment.47

  Two weeks later, Dyer and his wife boarded a ship in Bombay bound for England. It was exactly a year after the unrest had started at Amritsar and Chelmsford later admitted to Montagu that he had found it ‘expedient for many reasons to get Dyer out of the country as soon as possible’.48 To the Anglo-Indian community, however, Dyer was a hero, and throughout the spring there had been an outpouring of support for him. Norah Beckett, for instance, wrote an account of her ordeal at Amritsar on 10 April, published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine, which further cemented the emerging narrative of Dyer as ‘The Saviour of Punjab’.49 When Dyer left India, he thus carried with him an ornamental testimonial with the signatures of more than 200 people who had been in Punjab in 1919:

  Sir, We, the undersigned, desire to express our heartfelt gratitude for the firmness You displayed in the crisis which arose in this Province last April.

  We deplore the loss of life which occurred, but we believe that it was Your Action which saved the Punjab and thereby preserved the honour and lives of hundreds of women and children.

  We trust Sir, that You will understand that we, who would have suffered most, had the outbreak spread, shall not forget what we owe to You.50

  CHAPTER 13

  AFTERSHOCKS

>   I shot to save the British Raj – to preserve India for the Empire, and to protect Englishmen and Englishwomen who looked to me for protection. And now I am told to go for doing my duty – my horrible, dirty duty [. . .] I had to shoot. I had 30 seconds to make up my mind what action to take, and I did it. Every Englishman I have met in India has approved my act, horrible as it was. What should have happened if I had not shot? I and my little force would have been swept away like chaff, and then what would have happened? [. . .] If I had done anything wrong I should be court-martialled, but there has been no suggestion of that. I have never been heard in my own defence.1

  When Dyer disembarked at Portsmouth on 4 May, wearing his pith helmet and military coat, he was interviewed by a journalist from the Daily Mail and ‘stated his case bluntly’. This was to be the beginning of a campaign in the right-wing press to clear Dyer’s name, and supporters such as O’Dwyer insisted that the humiliated officer had been made a scapegoat to cover for the failings of liberal policies. The ensuing controversy about Dyer, which dominated politics and the newspaper headlines in the imperial metropole for months, exposed many of the fault-lines in British post-war politics. Conservatives, including Ulster unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, rallied to the defence of Dyer, while many Labour politicians, as well as the left-wing press, denounced the suppression of the unrest, which was seen simply as an expression of militarism.2 The debate thus came to revolve around issues that had very little to do with what had happened in Amritsar and everything to do with domestic politics.