Dyer, who had fallen ill with gout and jaundice and also suffered from arteriosclerosis, was summoned to Delhi on 23 March 1920, to meet Munro. Sir Havelock Hudson, the Adjutant General, who had thus far been a supporter, now told him bluntly that following censure from the Hunter Committee, he was to be deprived of his command. This was confirmed by Munro.
On 27 March 1920, about a year after the killings at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer wrote to his immediate superior, the General commanding the 2nd Division: ‘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 Committee regarding my action in Amritsar during April 1919, it was necessary for me to resign my appointment as Brigadier-General commanding the Infantry Brigade. Accordingly, I hereby ask that I be relieved of that appointment.’
Still convinced of his own righteous behaviour, Dyer reached London and constructed, with the help of a law firm—Messrs Sharp and Pritchard—a lengthy statement to place in front of the Army Council, which was to take the final decision on his case. He gave ever more reasons for the influences prevailing on him on 13 April 1919, as he entered Jallianwala Bagh, including the situation on the Afghan frontier, the possible threat to the lives of British men, women and children in Amritsar and throughout the Punjab, the danger of an uprising in rural areas for the purpose of committing other atrocities, the need to send out a strong message, and so on.
The Army Council’s decision on the Dyer Case was announced on 7 July in the House of Commons. The Secretary of State for War, Sir Winston Churchill, who had forcefully argued against Dyer, said the Council felt Dyer had committed an error of judgment; he was to be retired on half pay with no prospects of future employment.
Almost immediately after the pronouncement, there was a popular outpouring of support for Dyer. A fund started by the rightwing newspaper, Morning Post, climbed to £26,317 within a few weeks. The contributors included a ‘mutiny widow’, ‘a patriot’, ‘a beggar who loves justice’, ‘a widow and her daughter who know more about Amritsar than did Mr Montagu’, and so on. This sum was much larger than the amount that would eventually be distributed among the families of those who had died in Jallianwala Bagh. Nothing could demonstrate the growing chasm between England and her colony than their starkly differing stand on the motivations and actions of Dyer.
In the House of Commons, though, there was a concentrated effort by both the Secretaries of State, Montagu and Winston Churchill, to condemn the actions of Dyer. Montagu, aware of the importance of the debate and battling stress, did not manage to make the case forcefully enough, although he made some very salient points.
Montagu was himself attacked for his liberal views, and his Jewish background was used to colour his actions at the India Office. He became a victim of widespread anger during the debate in the House of Commons. Both Dyer and O’Dwyer were in the visitors’ gallery, along with some Indian princes. The benches were notably crowded as the press was also closely covering the proceedings. Austin Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, described the scene when Montagu began to condemn Dyer, in the face of palpable animosity:
I hope that I shall not have such a house as confronted Montagu on Thursday, and that, if I do, I shall not handle it so maladroitly. With the House in that temper nothing could have been so infuriating to it as his opening remarks—no word of sympathy with Dyer, no sign that Montagu appreciated his difficulties, but as it were a passionate peroration to a speech that had not been delivered, a grand finale to a debate which had not begun. Our party has always disliked and distrusted him. On this occasion all their English and racial feeling was stirred to a passionate display—I think I have never seen the House so fiercely angry—and he threw fuel on the flames. A Jew, rounding on an Englishman and throwing him to the wolves—that was the feeling.27
Opening the debate, which lasted for over nine hours, Montagu asked: ‘Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation and subordination and frightfulness, or are you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill, of the people of your Indian empire? I believe that to be the whole question at issue.’28
He went on to say, ‘Once you are entitled to have regard neither to the intentions nor to the conduct of a particular gathering, and to shoot and go on shooting with all the horrors that were here involved, in order to teach somebody else a lesson, you are embarking on terrorism, to which there is no end.’
As Meghnad Desai writes in Rediscovery of India, it was Churchill who rescued Montagu that evening. He made a powerful speech against Dyer, whom he criticised for ‘resorting to a doctrine of “frightfulness”.’
What I meant by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or country. . .Frightfulness is not a remedy known to British pharmacopoeia. This is not a British way of doing business.
Pointing squarely at the pro-Dyer Tories, he added:
However we may dwell upon the difficulties of General Dyer, during the Amritsar riots, upon the anxious and critical situation in the Punjab, upon the danger to Europeans throughout that province, upon the long delays which have taken place in reaching a decision about his office, upon the procedure that was at this point or that point adopted, however we may dwell upon all this, one tremendous fact stands out—I mean the slaughter of nearly 400 persons and the wounding of probably three or four times as many at the Jallian Wallah Bagh on 13 April.
This is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.29
Leading Liberal politicians forced a vote but the government was only successful by 101 votes. One hundred and nineteen of the 129 votes against the motion came from the government’s own Conservative coalition. This caused a split in the governing coalition that would eventually lead to the demise of Lloyd George’s government.
The matter was not yet over; there was another round of debates in Parliament, this time in the House of Lords, on 19 and 20 July 1920. Here, 129 voted in favour of Dyer. He may have felt vindicated by such a large majority, especially as the session was well-attended. He was certainly ‘pleased with the division. . . many peers greeted him afterwards in the lobby’, reported the Pall Mall Gazette, on 21 July 1920.30
‘There was a really brilliant scene in the House of Lords last night. . . Not since before the war’, wrote the ‘Clubman’, ‘had there been such a gathering of peeresses and the Stranger’s Gallery was crowded with distinguished Ango-Indians and Indians. The Indians, many of them, wore gorgeous turbans, and the ladies wonderful robes of silk.’31 Also present was the recently invested Duke of York (the future George VI), attending his first House of Lords debate.32
Among the sixteen speakers were five former Governors of Indian provinces, one former Viceroy, and three former Secretaries of State for India. Only six of them supported Viscount Finlay’s motion that ‘This House deplores the conduct of the case of General Dyer as unjust to that officer and as establishing a precedent dangerous to the preservation of order in the face of rebellion.’33
But the upholding of the motion, as the Guardian reported was ‘A vote in favour—even indirectly—of Prussianism’ in India by a House representing especially old British governing classes ‘must not merely do harm in India. . . It must also do harm at home. . .’34
Prominent Indians were aghast. Rabindranath Tagore wrote from London on 22d July:
The result of the Dyer debates in both Houses of Parliament makes painfully evident the attitude of mind of the ruling classes of the country towards India. It shows no outrage, however monstr
ous, committed against us by the agents of their Government, can arouse feelings of indignation in the hearts of those from whom our governors are chosen. The unashamed condonation of brutality expressed in their speeches and echoed in their newspapers is ugly in its frightfulness. The late events have conclusively proved that our true elevation lies in our own hands; that a nation’s greatness can never find its foundation in half hearted concessions of contemptuous niggardliness.
Jawaharlal Nehru, who had collected evidence of the brutalities in Punjab, wrote:
This cold blooded approval of that deed shocked me greatly. It seemed immoral, indecent, to use public school language. It was the height of bad form. I realised then, more vividly than I had ever done before, how brutal and immoral imperialism was, and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes.
By August, Gandhi’s opinion of the British had changed completely. He could no longer support the British in India. His letter to Viceroy Chelmsford on 2 August set the tone for future events:
The punitive measures taken by General Dyer were out of all proportion to the crime of the people and amounted to wanton cruelty, and inhumanity, unparalleled in modern times; and your Excellency’s lighthearted treatment of the official crime, your exoneration of Sir Michael O’Dwyer and Mr Montagu’s dispatches, and above all, your shameful ignorance of the Punjab events and callous disregard of the feelings betrayed by the House of Lords, have filled me with greatest misgivings regarding the future of the Empire, have estranged me completely from the present government and have disabled me from tendering, as I have hitherto tendered, my loyal co-operation.
Gandhi also returned the medals he had received from the British government. The battle lines were now drawn. His hand forced by the increasing rancour between Indians and the government, King George V issued a Royal Proclamation of Amnesty on 23 December, 1919, to rule a Royal Clemency to those who had been convicted under the martial law. This meant a reduction of sentences, much to the horror of the British solicitors who had worked the trials. The clemency was strongly disapproved of by many of the British officials in India.
None of those who were guilty of the atrocities—British officers or their Indian collaborators—were punished, thanks to the Indemnity Act. And despite efforts to bridge the gap through reforms, the horror that the events in Punjab evoked would make Indians wary about trusting the British again.
Dyer withdrew from the publicity that had followed him ever since the massacre, and settled down to a reclusive life. He died on 23 July 1927. He was given a military funeral, but despite attempts by his ‘well wishers’ to put up a memorial in his name in India, it came to naught.
O’Dwyer was killed at Caxton Hall, on 13 March 1940, by Uddham Singh. It is believed (though not proven) that as a 16-year-old orphan, he had seen the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and sworn revenge. Singh was hanged on 31 July 1940, at Pentonville Prison in London.
The Rowlatt Acts were never implemented. Accepting the report of the Repressive Laws Committee, the Government of India repealed the Rowlatt Acts, the Press Act, and 22 other laws in March 1922.
The deaths at Jallianwala Bagh would not go in vain. India won independence in 1947 and Gandhi, who could not forgive the British for what they had done in 1919, led the freedom struggle.
As he wrote: ‘We do not want to punish Dyer. We have no desire for revenge. We want to change the system that produced Dyer.’
* * *
1. UK Parliamentary Hansard, 1920.
2. Edwin Montagu, An Indian Diary (London: William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1930), pp. 207–9.
3. Montagu, An Indian Diary, pp. 207–9.
4. Montagu, An Indian Diary, p. 216.
5. Montagu, An Indian Diary, p. 136.
6. Shireen Ilahi, Imperial Violence and the Path to Independence: India, Ireland and the Crisis of Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), p. 168.
7. Ilahi, Imperial Violence, p. 168.
8. Michael O’Dwyer, India As I Knew It (London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1925), p. 217.
9. O’Dwyer, India As I Knew It, p. 219.
10. O’Dwyer, India As I Knew It, pp. 219, 224.
11. O’Dwyer, India As I Knew It, p. 221.
12. O’Dwyer, India As I Knew It, p. 229.
13. INC Report, p. 19.
14. INC Report, p. 21.
15. INC Report, p. 22.
16. INC Report, pp. 20–1.
17. INC Report, Volume II, pp. 713–14.
18. Mohan, An Imaginary Rebellion, p. 1009.
19. Rupert Furneaux, Massacre at Amritsar (George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1963), p. 113.
20. Reginald Dyer, The Raiders Of The Sarhad: Being The Account of a Campaign of Arms and Bluff Against the Brigands of the Persian-Baluchi Border during the Great War (London: H.F.&G Witherby, 1921).
21. Furneaux, Massacre at Amritsar, p. 112.
22. Furneaux, Massacre at Amritsar, p. 119.
23. Parliamentary Report, pp. 112–14.
24. Parliamentary Report, pp. 112–14.
25. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (1936), pp. 43–4. Accessed at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.98834.
26. Parliamentary Report, p. 115.
27. Sir Charles Petrie, The Life and Letters of Sir Austen Chamberlain (London: Cassell, 1940), pp. 152–3.
28. UK Parliamentary Hansard.
29. Meghnad Desai, The Rediscovery of India (Penguin Books India, 2009), pp. 138–9.
30. As quoted by Derek Sayer in his paper on Jallianwala Bagh. Accessed online.
31. As quoted by Derek Sayer, Pall Mall Gazette, 20 July 1920.
32. As quoted by Derek Sayer, 21 July 1920.
33. UK Parliamentary Hansard.
34. ‘An Unwise Voice’, Manchester Guardian, 21 July 1920. Quoted by Derek Sayer in his paper on Jallianwala Bagh. Accessed online.
Appendix I
Lala Lajpat Rai on ‘Imperialism Run Amuck’
The Punjab tragedy of 1919 is an event of historical importance. It is a chapter of the world’s history—a bloody chapter albeit—dyed red by the high priests of Imperialism, which will retain its freshness whenever the future generations of men and women happen to read it. It has placed us in a position to visualise the barbaric possibilities of Imperialism run amuck. Modern Indians had been so inoculated with the serum of ‘benevolent despotism’ as to make them forget that it is easier for a leopard to change its spots than for Imperialism to alter its true nature. Benevolent Imperialism is like a caged lion. However, you may play with it so long as it is caged or under the spell of a master-tamer, the moment it gets out of control, it is bound to behave in conformity with its real nature. The atrocities perpetuated at Amritsar have proved that Imperialism run mad is more dangerous, more vindictive, more inhuman, than a frenzied uncontrollable mob. When a mob gets out of hand, it does things pretty bad and cruel; but its destructiveness is born of passion and is not deliberately planned and thought out. Imperialism on the other hand, as represented by the O’Dwyers, Dyers, O’Briens, Bosworth Smiths, Johnsons, Dovetons and others, takes revenge with a deliberate aim. It plans out with a fixed purpose, and carries out those plans in a spirit of military vindictiveness.
As to the causes of this tragedy, it should not be forgotten that the Punjab has been seething with discontent for more than twenty years. With its unique record of services in the cause of the Empire, having profusely shed its blood in the expansion and protection of British dominions all the world over, having given its best in developing British colonies and British possessions, the treatment it has received has been most cruel and bitter. In fact, that very circumstance has been the reason why the Imperial bureaucracy has considered it necessary to deny to this province the benefits of education and industrial development to the extent to which they have been fostered in other provinces. The Punjab peasantry has been deliberately kept in ignorance, because of its being the chief recruiting source of the Indian army and the military police. Its chi
ldlike faith in British justice and fair play has kept it politically backward and, in a way, inarticulate. Whatever political life was in the province was crushed by various methods of repression and corruption.
Numbers of educated young men were brought over to the Government side by rewards of lands, offices, titles and other inducements of a similar nature. Others, who proved above these temptations, were persecuted and maltreated. In this connection, I might mention in passing the unrest of 1907, the historic trial of Arya Samajists in 1909, the prosecutions for sedition of 1909-1910, the conspiracy cases of 1913-1914, and the political trials held during the war. This is neither the time nor the place to go into details; but it is obvious that these were indications of growing unrest and discontent which should have moved any wise administration to initiate measures of conciliation. Instead of that, the defiant attitude of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, his firm faith in militarism, his iron and blood policy of keeping down all agitation and stopping the free expression of public opinion, together with the contempt which he displayed towards the aspirations of the Indians for self government, only added fuel to the fire. Thus the Rowlatt Act was only the proverbial straw on the camel’s back. The successful hartals of the 30th March and 6th April descended upon him and his henchmen like a bolt from the blue. The bureaucracy had all along been deluded and deceived by the false though reassuring, reports of their agents, spies and admirers; but now they found themselves suddenly disillusioned and in a fit of anger decided to embark upon a policy of unbridled retaliation and reprisals against those who had participated in the agitation against the Rowlatt Act.This short-sighted policy of the Late Lieutenant Governor and the arbitrary methods adopted to penalise those who had taken part in the agitation against the Rowlatt Act led to riots, which were followed by the declaration of martial law and all that followed it its wake.
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