The Patient Assassin

by Anita Anand

  The Patriot promulgated a mix of anti-Communism and anti-Semitism, with a generous helping of fervent colonialism on the side. It was the diet of Die Hards, and Sir Michael was happy to feed their appetite with his dire warnings about the future of the Raj and the dangers posed by men like Gandhi. Sensing the time was right to push his side of the India story, Sir Michael settled down to write his own version of events. India as I Knew It would be a look back at his time in office and a look forward to what might befall the Raj if the current policy of ‘Indian appeasement’, as he described it, continued.

  While Udham worked to become the man who might one day murder him, Sir Michael, blissfully unaware, concentrated on putting his thoughts on India down on paper. Work was going well, but then something happened that caused him to put away his pen and ink. In 1923, a former member of the viceroy’s executive council, a one-time judge of the Madras High Court called Sir Sankaran Nair, decided to take Sir Michael on, and it just so happened that the former lieutenant governor was more than up for a fight.

  Nair, like Sir Michael, had also been working on a book, but his was not a memoir. Instead it was a vicious diatribe against a man Sir Michael also detested: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the leader of India’s freedom movement.

  Nair’s Gandhi and the Anarchy turned out to be an eviscerating critique of the Mahatma, in which he savaged him over what he thought was a fallacious and costly strategy of non-cooperation. Nair accused Gandhi of getting too close to Muslims. His desire to woo the religious minority was putting Hindus at risk. The project, Nair insisted, had made him blind to atrocities being perpetrated by ‘Mohammedans’ against Hindus. ‘If [Nair’s] book had stopped there,’ wrote Sir Michael, ‘it would have had my hearty approval, as I had been constantly preaching the same doctrine for three years previously. But for some reason or other Sir Sankaran Nair thought it advisable to go out of his way to attack me.’1

  Nair took a number of swipes at Sir Michael in his book. As a member of the viceroy’s council, he felt he had access to insights that had not been available to the Hunter Committee: ‘No one feels for the Punjab more than I do. I doubt if anyone was in a position to know more of it than I was. Even now, with all the enquiries made by the Hunter Commission and the Congress Subcommittee, many deplorable incidents, as bad as any, worse perhaps than any reported, have not been disclosed.’

  With the full knowledge of these undisclosed facts, Nair felt fully confident to lay blame directly at Sir Michael’s feet: ‘Before the Reforms it was in the power of the lieutenant governor, a single individual, to commit the atrocities in the Punjab we know only too well.’2

  For that statement alone, Sir Michael was prepared to sue, but Nair had so much more to say: ‘The Punjab Government under [Sir Michael’s] direction was hostile to the educated classes, and was determined to supress not only illegitimate but also legitimate and constitutional political agitation . . . the eulogium passed by the English cabinet on Lord Chelmsford and Sir Michael O’Dwyer was an outrage on Indian public opinion.’3

  Sir Michael engaged the services of London solicitors Sir William Joynson-Hicks and Co. and demanded a retraction plus £1,000 in damages. He was delighted when Nair refused to settle.

  The case came before Mr Justice McCardie in the King’s Bench division on 30 April 1924, and would ultimately examine 125 witness and last for five weeks. The jury of nine men and three women included Harold Laski, a left-wing academic from the London School of Economics. Had Sir Michael’s powerful legal team looked into his background, they would have weeded Laski out at the first opportunity. Not that they needed to worry. Nair never stood a chance.

  Justice McCardie showed signs of outrageous bias from the start, nowhere more so than when the question of General Dyer’s actions was brought before the jury. He interrupted the Nair team’s line of questioning constantly, jumping in even when Sir Michael’s side seemed to have no objection. When one expert witness was called and gave testimony that stated Dyer should have issued an order to disperse before firing, McCardie interjected: ‘Warning should have been given even if it were useless?’4

  When Nair’s lawyer attempted to cross-examine Sir Michael, McCardie once again jumped in: ‘If General Dyer’s force had been surrounded and destroyed, no one with the faintest imagination can doubt that Amritsar would have been delivered over to anarchy. You seem to be ignoring the appalling consequences.’5

  On the central point of Sir Michael’s culpability in the massacre and martial law excesses, the judge mused aloud: ‘Can a man be said to be guilty of an atrocity when he is acting with complete integrity?’6

  On 29 May 1924, the jury in the case of O’Dwyer vs Nair retired for just over three hours. Laski was the lone dissenting voice; the rest of the jury unanimously ruled in favour of Sir Michael. He was, understandably, jubilant: ‘The view of eleven of the jury was clearly that of the judge, that Dyer’s action was justified and my approval thereof next day was of course doubly justified.’7

  The verdict came too late for Dyer: ‘General Dyer is shattered in health, a broken man,’8 wrote Sir Michael in his memoirs. Though he had been at the very heart of the case, Reginald Dyer was too sick to appear as a witness for either side.

  With the Nair verdict firmly behind him, Sir Michael was now free to finish his book and to include the vindication from the British courts. It went to the printers late in 1925, and by 1926 the former lieutenant governor was energetically promoting India as I Knew It across the country. It was greeted by a slew of favourable reviews. Sir Michael’s account of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre merited six pages out of a total of 453. His justifications took up many more.

  While Sir Michael peddled his version of events in England, across the Atlantic in New York, Udham had been busy amassing a small arsenal. The publication poured petrol on his seven years of smouldering rage. He already owned a ‘heavy revolver’, an expensive piece he had bought for $44 in California. To that he now added a Colt automatic and electroplated pistol along with 139 cartridges of ammunition.9 It looked as though he was getting ready for his own private war.

  Before Udham could even think of embarking on his mission, however, the Ghadars still had things they needed him to do. According to British surveillance reports, by 1926 the Ghadar Party in California was more active than it had been since the First World War.10 While Udham was gathering his guns and bullets, one prominent Ghadar from Punjab, Rattan Singh, had travelled to America, ‘arranging the travel of Ghadar members to Moscow’.11

  While Rattan worked on strengthening his ‘Sikh Comintern’ in America, Udham had somehow procured yet another passport ‘from the French counsel’12 with the express purpose of travelling to Eastern Europe. Why the French would have granted him such papers is baffling. As British intelligence were finding out to their cost, these Soviet-backed Ghadars were in overdrive, and their reach and influence was widespread.

  Landing in Le Havre, a port in Normandy, northern France, sometime in late 1926, Udham travelled under an unknown assumed name. He embarked on a whirlwind tour of Europe, travelling to Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Switzerland and Italy.13 Tucked into his itinerary was a trip to Vilna in Lithuania, and though the British could never prove it, they suspected that he might have used the city to make his way into Russia. This would have made him one of Rattan’s new breed of Indo-Bolshevik soldiers. He also had with him a substantial amount of cash, which he would later claim formed the bulk of his savings in the United States, around $1,000.14 On the wages he had been getting, it is unlikely that any of this cash was his own or meant for him to spend on himself. He would later claim that the funds had been wired to him by the ever-obliging Umberto Esposito, suggesting once again that he was acting as a conduit and that the Ghadars had friends in many surprising quarters.15

  Having spent more than four mysterious months in Eastern Europe, on 3 May 1927 Udham made his way to Casablanca in Morocco. Producing his Frank Brazil seaman’s papers once more, and apparently
having run out of money, he applied for and got a job on a ship called the SS Sinsinawa as a carpenter. It would pay him a modest wage and also get him back to the United States. He had been away from his family for months, but finally he was coming home to Lupe.16 Though she must have been grateful for his return, especially if she had been looking after two small children in his absence, the joy would be short-lived. Udham was not planning on staying for long.

  Whatever Udham had been sent to do in Europe, the Ghadars seemed pleased with the result. The sums of money wired to him had been considerable and he had returned to America obviously able to account for every cent. Udham was now a man who could be trusted to do bigger things. Udham barely had time to unpack before he was preparing to leave once again, this time with a large quantity of banned Ghadar propaganda and his personal cache of weapons. Pulling on his Western clothes and Frank Brazil identity once more, he sought employment on another ship, one that would take him to India, for the first time in years. The carpentry skills he learned at the orphanage put him in good stead and he was accepted as part of the crew for a ship called the SS Jalapa, bound for Calcutta in the first week of July 1927.17 The tour of duty, he was told, would last three months.

  The SS Jalapa was a busy steamship that regularly took passengers and cargo from New York to India, via Taipei, Hong Kong, Manila, Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore and Penang. It was a gruelling voyage for the crew, who faced quick turnarounds in most ports. Lupe may have been counting the days till its scheduled return to New York on 15 October 1927, but when the Jalapa did eventually sail back into New York harbour, it did so without her husband.

  Frank Brazil’s name on the crew manifest had been scored out with a heavy black line. The words ‘deserted Calcutta August’ were scrawled thickly in the right-hand corner.18 Lupe would never see her husband again and would eventually return to El Paso, the place where she in all likelihood had first met Udham, and where her parents still lived. She would die in El Paso in 1949 of ‘chronic ulcerative colitis’, a painful and debilitating inflammation of the gut, exacerbated by stress. Her death certificate described her as ‘a housewife’, although it made no mention of her husband’s name or of her children.19

  Had Udham’s ‘Frank Brazil’ intended to disappear in such a brutal way, or had circumstances simply changed the course of his life? He was certainly capable of callous indifference, as his abandonment of Pritam Singh had proved, but, thanks to his desertion, he was now known to the American authorities, and they would almost certainly have informed the Raj authorities in India. Looking back at the events that led to him jumping ship, it certainly seems as if a degree of his own carelessness forced the issue.

  The SS Jalapa had dropped anchor in the port of Karachi on 27 July,20 its first scheduled stop in India. The weather was hot and humid and Karachi was a hectic port. As the Jalapa took on much-needed fuel and provisions, Udham would have looked over the side and seen a gratifyingly familiar chaos on the quayside: a sea of brown faces, his own language coming from many mouths. He had been away from all this for five long years.

  Karachi was the largest grain-exporting port in the whole of the British Empire, and the dock was a tangle of men, winches and crates. Passengers and crew on the Jalapa would have been anxious to disembark, if only to find some cooler sanctuary from the pre-monsoon fug. Usually customs officials at Karachi were just as anxious to get through their work as the passengers were to get on with their lives. There were ships coming and going all the time, and much cargo to inspect. Searches of crews’ cabins were usually cursory, however this time round Udham saw them rifling with far more diligence than usual.

  This gave him even more reason to sweat than the muggy climate. Udham had brought his guns and bullets aboard the Jalapa, and though he was confident he had hidden them well, in a secret compartment in his toolbox,21 he was not so sure about the Ghadar newspapers he had smuggled on board in his suitcase. They would be regarded as being as dangerous as his guns, strictly prohibited in India. Had the customs men found them, they would have immediately understood his intention to have them reproduced and distributed among his people in India. The propaganda alone could have landed him swiftly in jail.

  In the end, it would not be his guns and Ghadar propaganda that would get him into trouble, but instead a large number of what the customs officer described as ‘obscene postcards’.22 The cards were never described in any further detail, but if they had been pornographic, as one might suspect from the use of the word ‘obscene’, it would not have been so surprising. Widely available in America, these things were extremely rare in conservative India. They would have been valuable currency in certain, less salubrious, circles, a way of sweetening deals or getting things done quickly.

  Perhaps his years in America had made him blasé about such things, but Udham had not thought to hide his dirty postcards. He saw his stash confiscated and was forced to pay a fine. The cost of the discovery was higher than the customs official would ever know. Udham was now on the authorities’ radar, for a silly and embarrassing mistake. It was enough to make him want to disappear fast.

  Though the postcards had linked him neither to the Ghadars nor his true identity, the name ‘Frank Brazil’ was now flagged for the minor offence. This brought the risk of further inquiry at future ports. Udham knew that his American crewmates and Jalapa employers had accepted his claim of being ‘Puerto Rican’, but he was an Indian in India now. The Raj had more experience of his kind than the Americans who had either blindly or wilfully looked the other way. The next man to check his papers might be more diligent than the postcard confiscator. He could not and would not take the chance.

  At the next available opportunity, Udham decided he would jump ship. The Jalapa was due a long layover in Calcutta. It was perfect. Nobody would expect him back for days, giving him plenty of time to get away from the port and out of the city. When the Jalapa next docked in Bengal, Udham disembarked normally, telling his crewmates that he would see them in ten days. Toolbox and suitcase in hand, he had no intention of coming back.

  Instead, Udham went to ‘Imperial Hotel near New Market’23 to lie low, a cheap dive of a place where nobody asked any questions. Only when he was sure that he was not being followed, Udham bought a ticket for the Calcutta Mail, a train that would take him north.24 Armed to the teeth, with his Ghadar sedition giving weight to his belongings, Udham was going back to Punjab.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE SUFFERING OF SIMPLE BOYS

  Udham was finally going home, but one of the men he wanted to kill had slipped his reach for ever.

  The downward spiral for Rex Dyer began on 10 July 1927, on a night when the skies above Long Ashton, his hideaway home in the countryside, were lit up by a dramatic electrical storm.1 Lightning knocked out the power supply to Dyer’s cottage, leaving his family scrambling for candles. When his wife Annie went in to check on him, Dyer was greatly agitated. Nothing she, nor her son Geoff, nor her daughter-in-law Phyllis, said seemed to calm him. His mind seemed entirely filled with thoughts of Jallianwala Bagh. As Phyllis tried her best to reassure him that the darkness, like his ill health, would pass, Rex turned to her and said: ‘Thank you but I don’t want to get better. So many people who knew the condition of Amritsar say I did right . . . but so many others say I did wrong. I only want to die and know from my Maker whether I did right or wrong.’2

  Later that same night, Dyer suffered a catastrophic stroke that robbed him of speech. His family watched powerless as his condition deteriorated.

  On 23 July 1927, Reginald Dyer, ‘The Butcher of Amritsar’, died in his bed, surrounded by the people who loved him most. His end had been neither quick nor kind, though Annie tried to ease his suffering, holding him till the very end. Dyer’s death certificate would say that he died of a cerebral haemorrhage, exacerbated by his arteriosclerosis. His family would always believe that he died of a broken heart.3

  Reginald Dyer’s body was taken to his local church on 27 July for what was sup
posed to be a small ceremony of remembrance. However, press from around the country got wind of his passing and descended on the quiet village of Long Ashton in numbers. It seemed to reporters as if every resident of the sleepy parish, as well as many from the surrounding area, had turned out to honour their reclusive son.

  A line of mourners fell into step behind Dyer’s family as they made their way from his home to the pretty little All Saints Church nearby: ‘The procession was watched by villagers with bare heads. Scores of motor vehicles using the main Bristol-to-Weston-super-Mare road halted as the cortege passed.’4

  The vicar of All Saints, Reverend John Varley, seeing the packed pews before him, took the opportunity to take a swipe at those who had criticised Dyer in life: ‘Our brother deserved well of this country,’ adding: ‘We pray that for him there may be granted the three-fold boon of light, refreshment and peace.’5

  The final boon would have meant the most to Dyer. He had never known a day’s peace since the shootings at Jallianwala Bagh, as one in his close circle told a reporter:

  ‘His death is undoubtedly a direct result of the Amritsar affair,’ a life-long friend told a press representative yesterday.

  He was broken hearted over the Amritsar affair. It played on his mind terribly, and to gain rest from his thoughts he used to read literally all day and night. When his eyes were too tired, his wife, who is devoted to him, would read aloud.

  General Dyer’s grief was not only at having his career ruined. He was more concerned at having had to be the cause of so many deaths. General Dyer was the most kind-hearted and gentle man alive. He was just a big, simple boy, and hated to see others suffer. Yet he always told me that if he were to re-act the Amritsar case a million times, he would always give the same order to fire. It was the only thing a true soldier could have done in the circumstances.6