by Anita Anand
Before the panel even called its first witness, there were objections to its impartiality. Some questioned the suitability of Hunter himself. The man had no Indian experience, knew not a single word of Hindi, and was described by one of his fellow inquiry members as ‘a mild man somewhat dazzled by his entry on a new stage’.1 Others found fault with the inquisitors. Pandit Jagat Narayan, a lawyer and member of the legislative council; Sardar Sahibzada Sultan Ahmad Khan, a lawyer from Gwalior State; and Sir Chimanlal Harilal Setalvad, an advocate and vice chancellor of Bombay University had been selected, but other, arguably more prominent, Indian jurists had been overlooked.
What caused deeper fury still was that the Indians on the panel were outnumbered by whites. If, as would ultimately come to pass, the committee was divided in opinion on racial lines, the British would have the power to overrule the Indian voices. Ever the lawyer, Gandhi railed against the injustice in the very fabric of the process.
Scepticism notwithstanding, the Hunter Commission was given unprecedented access to witnesses and far-reaching powers of inquiry. However, it was not constituted as a court of law, so members of the panel had no power to compel witnesses to appear or answer their questions. Cross-examination would not take place under oath, therefore any who gave false evidence would never be punished for perjury. Gandhi was so affronted by these shortcomings that he set up an unofficial parallel Congress-led inquiry, which would also gather evidence and interrogate witnesses. If Hunter failed in its duty, he would not fail in his. One way or another, the Raj would have to face what it had done.
Sir Michael hated the Hunter Commission as much as Gandhi, but for very different reasons. Its mere existence was an affront. The thought of ‘clever native lawyers’ examining white men in uniform was an abomination to him and his friends.
Of all the Indians on the panel, Sir Chimanlal Setalvad was the most skilful interrogator, and quickly became the main hate figure for those brought before him. Some British officers treated the soft-spoken lawyer with sullen evasion, others with naked aggression. Setalvad pressed on regardless and, despite the relative impotence of his position, the admissions he extracted would prove seismic, particularly where Brigadier General Dyer was concerned.
Dyer’s supporters watched in despair as the brigadier general self-immolated. During a full day of questioning, Dyer was asked why he had not issued an order for the Jallianwala Bagh crowds to disperse before opening fire:
At that time it did not occur to me. I merely felt that my orders had not been obeyed, that martial law was flouted, and that it was my duty to immediately disperse it by rifle fire . . . If my orders were not obeyed, I would fire immediately. If I had fired a little, the effect would not be sufficient. If I had fired a little, I should be wrong in firing at all.2
Setalvad pursued him on the matter of intent. If the entrance to the garden had been wider, would he really have driven his gun-mounted cars in? Would he have used the machine guns on the crowd? Dyer answered without flinching:
DYER: I think probably yes.
SETALVAD: I n that case the casualties would have been much higher?
DYER: Yes.
Setalvad put it to Dyer that innocent men women and children were in the garden. Dyer disagreed. In his view, all those gathered were rebels: ‘Therefore, I considered it my duty to fire on them and to fire well.’ Setalvad pressed him to elaborate:
DYER: They had come out to fight if they defied me, and I was going to give them a lesson.
SETALVAD: I take it that your idea in taking that action was to strike terror?
DYER: Call it what you like. I was going to punish them. My idea from the military point of view was to make a wide impression.
SETALVAD: To strike terror not only in the city of Amritsar, but throughout the Punjab?
DYER: Yes, throughout the Punjab. I wanted to reduce their moral, the moral [sic] of the rebels.3
Quietly pursued by the dogged line of questioning, Dyer made one incendiary comment after another. Why had he fired for so long? ‘I thought I would be doing a jolly lot of good and they would realise that they were not to be wicked.’4
In Westminster, a Cabinet committee received regular updates from both the Hunter Commission and Gandhi’s unofficial parallel inquiry. Attempting to limit the damage Dyer was doing to himself and by extension everybody else who had been in Punjab at that time, Sir Michael asked Montagu to let him address Cabinet directly and in private.
Montagu turned him down flat. When Sir Michael tried to go over Montagu’s head, the prime minister also told him to go away. It was a bitter blow:
Had I been like Michael Collins, a successful organiser of rebellion against the British Government, the doors of Downing Street would have flown open before me, but as I had merely come to plead for men who had suffered for assisting me in crushing a rebellion against the British Government, Downing Street was a closed door to me!5
On 26 May 1920, the Hunter Commission was ready to report, though predictably it failed to do so with one voice. The panel could not agree whether Sir Michael had been justified in assuming Punjab was on the threshold of full-scale rebellion. The British thought he may well have had grounds. The Indians did not. Members also tussled over the army’s behaviour during martial law, with the question of proportionality dividing them again.
On one issue, they were broadly in agreement: Reginald Dyer had overstepped the bounds of his authority; he had failed to give the people in the Bagh the chance to disperse; he had shown grave error of judgement allowing his men to fire for as long as they did. He fired on the crowd to produce a ‘moral effect’, and that motivation was deemed deplorable.
Even though they had broadly reached agreement on Dyer, the Indians on the panel refused to put their name to the final report and denounced it for, among other things, failing to adequately address Sir Michael’s role in the affair. Issuing a separate minority report, the Indians wanted to make it known that, as lieutenant governor, he had been utterly wrong to assume that Punjab was on the brink of revolt. His actions, and overreactions, had precipitated the massacre and everything that followed.
As for Dyer, the minority report went much further than Hunter. His drum proclamation had been woefully insufficient. Those within the Bagh had shown no violent intent. They had been shown no mercy. Dyer had shot innocent men, women and children blindly and without discrimination. He had failed to offer any medical assistance to those he had left wounded. In effect, he had left innocent people to die.
If Montagu had hoped to calm the waters with this inquiry, he failed miserably. In India, they were already calling Dyer ‘The Butcher of Amritsar’.
On 23 March 1920, three days before the final and contested Hunter Commission report was made public, Dyer was forced to resign from the army. He had been recommended for a CBE for his service in the Third Afghan War, however that recommendation was now withdrawn. It was a catastrophic blow. Dyer’s career and his reputation were in tatters. India, the land of his birth, was now closed to him.
Dyer’s censure, when it became public, caused a storm. British newspapers were inundated with letters protesting the former brigadier general’s treatment. One correspondent to The Times, Constance Tuting, a resident of Punjab for over twenty years, wrote: ‘Will England stoop to pander to their [Indians’] clamour and endanger her own people by condemning an honourable officer doing his duty?’6
The top brass of the Army Council agreed, though they had been asked by Winston Churchill to keep their furious opinions to themselves. Writing privately to a friend, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, would express anger and exasperation. He regarded the politicians as effeminately craven:
Winston made a long speech, prejudging the case and in effect saying that the Cabinet had decided to throw out Dyer, and that it was advisable for the Army Council to agree . . . The Frocks have got India (as they have Ireland) into a filthy mess . . . On that the soldiers are called in, and act
. This is disapproved of by all the disloyal elements, and the soldier is thrown to the winds. All quite simple.7
Politicians sought to soothe their Indian colony as best they could by condemning the massacre and subsequent excesses of martial law, much to Sir Michael’s disgust. One parliamentary proceeding proved particularly hurtful to him.
On 8 July 1920, a debate was slated: ‘The Army Council and General Dyer’. Since he was to be the meat at the feast, Dyer wanted to hear what was said about him with his own ears. Sir Michael had insisted on going with him for moral support, sitting by his side in the public gallery, a show of solidarity to those speaking below. The pair sat stony-faced as their conduct was dissected in the chamber. Montagu was one of the first to wield a scalpel:
MR MONTAGU: Once you are entitled to have regard neither to the intentions nor to the conduct of a particular gathering, and to shoot and to go on shooting, with all the horrors that were here involved, in order to teach somebody else a lesson, you are embarking upon terrorism, to which there is no end. I say, further, that when you pass an order that all Indians, whoever they may be, must crawl past a particular place, when you pass an order to say that all Indians, whoever they may be, must forcibly or voluntarily salaam any officer of His Majesty the King, you are enforcing racial humiliation. I say, thirdly, that when you take selected schoolboys from a school, guilty or innocent, and whip them publicly, when you put up a triangle, where an outrage which we all deplore and which all India deplores has taken place, and whip people who have not been convicted, when you flog a wedding party, you are indulging in frightfulness, and there is no other adequate word which could describe it.
MR PALMER: It saved a mutiny.
MR MONTAGU: Somebody says that ‘it saved a mutiny’.
CAPTAIN W. BENN: Do not answer him.
MR MONTAGU: The great objection to terrorism, the great objection to the rule of force, is that you pursue it without regard to the people who suffer from it, and that having once tried it you must go on. Every time an incident happens you are confronted with the increasing animosity of the people who suffer, and there is no end to it until the people in whose name we are governing India, the people of this country, and the national pride and sentiment of the Indian people rise together in protest and terminate your rule in India as being impossible on modern ideas of what an Empire means.8
Churchill, usually a stalwart defender of the empire and the army, joined the chorus of disapproval. He described the massacre as: ‘An episode . . . without precedent or parallel in the modern History of the British Empire . . . an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.’9
Former British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith was equally scathing: ‘There has never been such an incident in the whole annals of Anglo-Indian history nor, I believe, in the history of our empire from its very inception down to the present day . . . It is one of the worst outrages in the whole of our history.’10
To hear such words from a fellow Balliol boy, one he had openly admired in the past, cut Sir Michael to the quick. Benjamin Charles Spoor, a Labour MP, demanded an immediate repeal of all the former lieutenant governor’s most draconian laws. He pushed for proper trials and sentences for those named and shamed in the Hunter report. To howls of derision from the packed Conservative benches, Spoor rounded on Sir Michael:
It was Sir Michael O’Dwyer who was primarily responsible for the use of aeroplanes at Gujranwala. In connection with that raid, I believe, bombs were actually dropped into the playground of a school. According to the Congress report, all disorder that had occurred in Gujranwala had actually ceased before the aeroplanes arrived and began their bombardment. I submit that Sir Michael O’Dwyer and those like him typify that kind of Anglo-Indian who is the greatest menace to the security of the empire and the greatest barrier to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India.11
The response was deafening, with members on both sides rising to their feet, waving fists and order papers, and roaring at each other. Few could remember such anger in the House or such a split in those for and against the men in the gallery. In his broad Irish brogue, the Unionist MP Sir Edward Carson looked up at Dyer and, holding eye contact, praised him as ‘a gallant officer of thirty-four years’ service . . . without a blemish on his record.’12
Turning his gaze on Sir Edwin Montagu, Carson bellowed: ‘I say, to break a man under the circumstances of this case is un-English. Un-English!’ The words were designed to wound. Montagu was Jewish and had been accused many times of being ‘foreign’ and ‘un-English’ purely by virtue of his religion.
Anti-Semitic slurs, far less nuanced than Carson’s, flew from the Conservative benches. As Sir William Sutherland, the parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, would later note: ‘A strong anti-Jewish sentiment was shown by shouts and excitement among the normally placid Tories of the backbench category . . . Altogether it was a very astonishing exhibition of anti-Jewish feeling.’13 Montagu had heard it all before, but it was beginning to drive him to despair.
Montagu was only the third practising Jew to serve in Cabinet. In many of his colleagues’ eyes, this defined him as of a lower caste. Unusually tall, Montagu’s dapper dress sense and habitual wearing of a monocle made him stand out even before people judged him for the god he worshipped. Despite often blatant anti-Semitism, Montagu managed to hold a number of important posts under two prime ministers before becoming secretary of state for India in 1917. That the Jallianwala Bagh massacre happened on his watch was a terrible irony. Montagu had done more than any of his predecessors to give Indians a semblance of self-government. It was one of the earliest reasons Sir Michael had to hate him.
Montagu had personally travelled to India in 1919 to meet Lord Chelmsford, the viceroy of India, in order to persuade him of the benefits of ‘dyarchy’, or limited power-sharing with the native Indians. Although Chelmsford was initially sceptical, Montagu was relentless and got him to agree.
A year after Britain’s Representation of the People Act granted the vote to all men over the age of twenty-one and property-owning women over the age of thirty, Montagu announced that Indians in the British Empire would also benefit from greater democracy. The Indian legislation went nowhere as far as the RPA, but it was at least a start. The law, enacted eight months after the massacre on 23 December 1919, granted what moderate nationalists had asked for over a number of decades. It gave Indians some say in their affairs:
The policy of His Majesty’s Government with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of increasing the association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.14
Just over five million of India’s wealthiest citizens would get the right to vote, a tiny proportion of the population. Their ballots would have limited potency; they could elect officials for only a few branches of government. Indians would be able to hold office in the Raj ministries of education, health and public works. It fell far short of what the nationalists had wanted, but it was a start.
Sir Michael protested this limited enfranchisement vigorously, supported by a group of influential ‘Die Hards’. They objected to any move that diluted British colonial power. Die Hard attacks on Montagu intensified and grew more personal and bigoted. They openly referred to the secretary of state as ‘Monty-Jew’,15 and talked of him as if he were an alien traitor, working in the midst of government to dismantle the empire. The constant onslaught was driving him into a very dark place: ‘I have isolated myself from my colleagues and such is the racial bitterness in India that nobody who tries can satisfy either Indian or European. The whole thing looks gloomy . . . I wonder when the sun will ever shine again?’16
Montagu was not the only one in the grip of depression.
Grey England, with its long, bone-chi
llingly damp winters, did not suit Rex Dyer. He missed the intense heat of the plains, galloping his horses, mucking in with his men with his shirtsleeves rolled up over sunburned elbows. Dyer was Indian born and bred, but he could never go ‘home’ again. The country of his forefathers did not fit him nearly as well as India did. His memories of Britain were almost entirely miserable.
As was the custom in wealthy colonial families, at the age of eleven, Dyer, along with his older brother Walter, had been sent to boarding school in Ireland. The Dyer boys, with their ‘Indian ways’, were a major curiosity at Middleton College in County Cork. The younger Dyer was particularly unhappy. He had a stammer, which on top of his Indian upbringing set him up as even more of an outsider. Dyer was bullied mercilessly.17 It took years of hard work to rid himself of his speech impediment, but by the time he enrolled at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, he was free of it.18 The military had been the making of him.
After Hunter, Dyer was a soldier no more. He did not know what he was. While Sir Michael seemed to thrive on the attention, Dyer hated talking about Jallianwala Bagh or anything to do with Punjab. The Die Hards did their best to support him, making stirring speeches about his bravery and nobility, crediting him with saving the Raj single-handedly. However, the mere mention of the incident was difficult for him to bear.
Dyer broke his silence just once, in January 1921, when he penned an article for the Globe newspaper headlined ‘India’s Path to Suicide’. In it, and without ever mentioning the incident with which he was most associated, Dyer gave the Die Hards something of what they craved: