Raj

by Lawrence, James

  Gandhi, dazed by the results of his satyagraha campaign, suspended it on 18 April. Not long afterwards, he spoke to Sir George Lloyd, the Governor of Bombay, who afterwards told Chelmsford that ‘he feels that he has failed, but he is anxious to go down, if possible, with colours flying as a martyr’.40 In June Gandhi wrote to Montagu, accepting a share of the blame for what had happened, shifted the bulk of it on to the authorities and pledged that he would renew the satyagraha campaigns at an unspecified date.41

  III

  A news blackout prevented exact details of what was happening in the Punjab from reaching newspapers in India and Britain until June, when martial law was lifted. At the beginning of May the war with Afghanistan became the centre of official and newspaper attention. It was a half-hearted affair in which Afghan units crossed the frontier from 4 May onwards, but were gradually pushed back during the next three weeks. The offensive was accompanied by some inflammatory pro-Islamic propaganda to the effect that Germany had restarted the war, there was a rebellion in Egypt (which was true) and Sikhs had turned their rifles on their British officers at Amritsar (which was not). Intelligence that the Afghan attack had been planned to coincide with uprisings in the Punjab gave substance to O’Dwyer’s belief that he had been faced with a revolutionary conspiracy.

  Dismal memories of previous incursions into Afghanistan and over-strained resources ruled out any bold counter-attack, and there was an additional problem in the form of the Wazirs, Mahsuds and Afridis who joined in the fray on the Afghan side. Some officers grumbled about not being allowed to take the offensive in the old frontier manner, but for Delhi and London the war was an embarrassing distraction which they hoped to end swiftly. Nonetheless, no risks were taken and 340,000 British and Indian troops were concentrated on the frontier, over two-thirds of India’s garrison.42

  Aggressive action was left to the Royal Air Force. Aircraft were widely employed, both against tribesmen and Afghans, and with encouraging results. Air Force officers boasted that the frontiersmen ‘live in dread of aeroplanes’, but they soon managed to overcome their fear. On 9 May three machines were brought down by ground fire, losses the RAF attributed to the ‘intrepidity of the pilots’ and ‘the good marksmanship of the Afridi tribes’. An aircraft crashing on take-off at Miramshah inspired a local mullah to claim he could destroy them by spells, but subsequent raids against local villages undermined faith in his magic.43 A series of heavy bombing raids was launched against strategic targets inside Afghanistan; six tons of bombs fell on Jalalabad in one attack and in another on Dacca machines flew in waves from morning to evening, inflicting an estimated 600 casualties, including two elephants. The climax of the air war came on 24 May (Empire Day) with a raid on Kabul by a four-engined Handley Page V 1500, named ‘Old Carthusian’, which had been specially flown from Britain.

  Among the targets hit was the Amir Ammanullah’s palace. He complained to Chelmsford, alleging that air raids against a people which did not possess aeroplanes had aroused bitter resentment.44 This disadvantage was about to disappear; RAF intelligence had picked up rumours that the Afghans were getting four machines from Russia.45 The British government was also considering raising the stakes to secure a speedy outcome to the war, and, on 14 May, offered Chelmsford supplies of poisoned gas. He replied that the military situation did not yet warrant its employment and ‘until such is the case we consider it would be impolitic to initiate its use’.46 The Indo-Afghan frontier was spared the horrors of the Western Front, as both sides agreed to a truce at the beginning of June. A peace was finally agreed in November 1921, which returned Anglo-Afghan relations to their pre-war status.

  Tribal resistance continued to flare up for the next five years and was dealt with in the old way. Columns penetrated the valleys, extracted fines and pledges for good behaviour and, when neither were forthcoming, burned crops and villages. ‘I am afraid that they will undergo most awful hardship this and next year, until they have got their crops going again,’ Major-General Harold Lewis noted in his diary. But inaction would invite another ‘show in the near future’. A further four months of campaigning against the Mahsuds left him wondering whether tenacity owed something to ‘the Bolshevik menace’.47 Russia too was suspected of having encouraged the Afghans in their cross-border venture, and, for some time to come, British and Indian intelligence collectors and analysts blamed Moscow for every challenge to the Raj.

  Even the British soldier was succumbing to what his officers would have called ‘Bolshevism’. Troops shipped from Iraq to meet the Afghan threat were sullen at having their demobilisation postponed and hooted at officers on the streets of Peshawar. There were murmurings among the British garrison in other areas. At Sialkot, men wanting to go home mutinied and were threatened by artillery in a episode reminiscent of the 1857 Mutiny.48 A ‘strike’ among army account clerks in September 1919 at Poona spread to other units dissatisfied with the pace of demobilisation. ‘It will be very bad if Indian troops get to know,’ Chelmsford commented.49 Demobilisation was accelerated and 48,000 men who had enlisted for the duration of the war were shipped home between October and December, over a year after the conflict in Europe had ended. The mood of those who stayed and the replacements remained cussed. In June 1920 there was a soldiers’ strike over how their pay was rendered into rupees. ‘The modern British soldier is thoroughly imbued with the idea of downing tools in the event of things not going his way,’ Chelmsford informed London, ‘and we have to face the fact that a very different spirit animates the modern British soldier from that which pervaded the pre-war British Army.’50 More frightening was the mutiny by Irish nationalist sympathisers among the Connaught Rangers in July 1920, during which several men were killed. At one stage in this disturbance there had been a rumour that English detachments had machine-gunned a crowd of rebellious Irish soldiers at Jalandhar in what was, in effect, a second Amritsar.

  III

  After Amritsar, Dyer had proceeded to the frontier, where he distinguished himself as commander of a force which relieved the fort of Thal during the Afghan war. Precise details of his actions in Amritsar and the nature of measures taken elsewhere in the Punjab were gradually coming to light in the summer of 1919. Much of the information was gathered from eyewitnesses by Congress supporters, many of them lawyers, who entered the province once martial law had been lifted.

  This testimony was published the following March, shortly before the appearance of an official report compiled by a committee under Lord Hunter, a Scottish jurist. Its proceedings were public and conducted against constant interruptions from indignant Indian spectators, whom Hunter did little to subdue. Two sharp-witted Indian lawyers acted, as it were, for their countrymen, and they found Dyer easy prey when he gave evidence during the third week of November. Unprepared, unrepentant and unrepresented, he admitted under cross-examination that he had first planned to use armoured-car machine-gun fire on the demonstrators and gave a distinct impression that, in the words of one of his inquisitors, he intended to ‘strike terror’ into the whole of the Punjab. Not long after, he spoke his mind again to some brother officers with whom he was sharing a sleeping car on the Amritsar to Delhi night train. Another passenger, Jawaharlal Nehru, then a young lawyer and Congress supporter, overheard him say that he had had Amritsar at his mercy and that he had been briefly inclined to reduce it to ashes.

  Dyer’s candour brought about his downfall and a major scandal which poisoned Anglo-Indian relations. Montagu was ‘staggered’ by the revelations and, quick to cover his flank, accused the Punjabi authorities of having been sparing with the truth in their accounts of what had occurred.51 Chelmsford countered by saying that Dyer’s frankness had made a ‘favourable impression’ on the committee, but, as the crisis deepened, he trimmed his sails and came down against the man he had once defended.52 On 25 May 1920, two months after he had read Hunter’s report, the Viceroy told King George V that, with ‘the greatest reluctance’, he had been forced to take an adverse view of Dyer’s
conduct. This change of heart was noticeable elsewhere, or so Gandhi imagined:

  I think the officials, too, are repenting. They may not do so in public, and General Dyer may say what he likes; they do feel ashamed, nonetheless. They dimly realise that they have made a mistake and, I am certain that, if we go about our task in a clean way, the time will come when they will repent openly.53

  They did, but only up to a point. The majority of the Hunter committee severely censured Dyer but gently reprimanded O’Dwyer, while its three Indian members wholeheartedly condemned both. What followed was an official exercise in damage limitation, for the British and Indian press now knew everything there was to be known about the events in the Punjab. Dyer was the first casualty. A relieved Indian government had granted him six months’ sick leave and he had left for England at the beginning of April 1920. He disembarked at Southampton on 3 May, and was greeted by a Daily Mail journalist to whom he admitted: ‘I had to shoot. I had thirty 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.’ Twelve days later he was ordered to resign his command by Major-General Sir Charles Monro, the commander-in-chief in India, who told him that there was no longer any position open to him in India. If neccessary, the general added: ‘He should be made to retire.’54

  This was also the opinion of Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for War, and it echoed the view of Montagu, who had long feared the worst about Dyer. Both found themselves under fierce attack in the press and the Commons from those who regarded Dyer as the man who, by his unwavering attachment to his duty, had saved India. His most forceful defender was the ultra-Conservative Morning Post which, on 28 May, proclaimed: ‘For practical purposes, General Dyer was facing the core of the Punjab rebellion with fifty rifles.’ He had rescued the Raj and now an ungrateful, cowardly government had ‘decided to sacrifice General Dyer to the susceptibilities of native agitators’. A few days after, Sir Verney Lovett, a former member of the ICS and reader in Indian history at Oxford, reminded Morning Post readers that the disturbances in the Punjab in April 1919 had been the worst since the 1857 Mutiny. Another, anonymous correspondent (‘Briton’) quoted the Lahore Pioneer of 31 May 1919, which had described posters in Amritsar that invited Indians to rape white women ‘in the blessed name of Mahatma Gandhi’.55

  On 9 July the Morning Post opened a fund for Dyer as a recognition and reward for his ‘prompt and stern measures’ which had saved India. The response was astonishing. There was £1,100 from the ‘Ladies of Calcutta’, who were incensed by the posters inciting attacks on British women, and £100 from an American lady who had once visited India and wrote, ‘I fear for the British women there now that Dyer has been dismissed.’ Among the smaller donations were sums from Rudyard Kipling, ‘An indignant Englishwoman’, ‘An Old Punjabi’, ‘A Mutiny veteran’s daughter’ and ‘One who has been in the East and knows its perils’. Thirty-seven pounds was collected at an Alnwick livestock auction, including the proceeds from the sale of a sheep given by one well-wisher; Northumberland farmers and stockmen clearly understood the need for firmness in India. So did thousands of others: within three weeks subscriptions had reached £15,000, and when the fund was closed it totalled over £26,000. The figure was both a popular vindication of Dyer and a slap in the face for India.

  The cash was a consolation for Dyer, whose dismissal had been upheld by the Commons. It was the subject of an acrimonious and rowdy debate during the afternoon and evening of 8 July which, in large part, was a motion of censure on Montagu. He began the proceedings with a plea for a liberal Raj which, he fervently believed, could only flourish so long as it enjoyed the goodwill of its subjects. This had been severely bruised by Dyer’s acts and words; how could the British preach ideas about individual liberty on one hand and then, on the other, tell an educated Indian who took them at face value that he was an agitator? If Britain chose to rule India by the sword alone, it would, he predicted, ‘be driven out by the united opinion of the civilised world’.56 ‘Bolshevism!’ bellowed one furious Tory. Later another heckler of the same persuasion suggested sending Dyer to Ireland to deal with Sinn Féin. An Ulsterman, Sir Edward Carson, then spoke for Dyer, arguing that he had crushed an incipient revolution which was part of a global plot: ‘It is all one conspiracy, it is engineered in the same way, it has the same object – to destroy our sea-power and drive us out of Asia.’

  Variations on the theme of Dyer as India’s saviour followed from his supporters, including the outspoken Sir William Joynson Hicks, who had the advantage of having recently toured India where he had found huge support for ‘the inevitable and necessary blow’ that had been struck at Amritsar. The government benches were rallied by Winston Churchill who, in characteristically trenchant manner, denounced the ‘frightfulness’ in the Punjab and expanded on Montagu’s argument that the Raj rested not on force but on the co-operation of its subjects. In private, Churchill believed that Dyer had been right to ‘shoot hard’, to extricate his force before taking measures for the care of wounded and that the ‘crawling order’ was a ‘minor issue’. What stuck in his craw and that of the army’s high command was Dyer’s repeated assertion that he would liked to have killed more.57 Nonetheless, Churchill’s castigation of the general helped swing the debate the government’s way.

  The Lords discussed Dyer eleven days later in a more sedate manner. The government’s position was defended by an Indian peer, Lord Sinha, a barrister and Under-Secretary of State at the India Office. He reminded listeners of the ‘strong passion’ which had been aroused among his countrymen by the massacre and the racial humiliations subsequently inflicted on them.58 Similar sentiments were expressed by R. G. Pradhan, the New Statesman’s Bombay correspondent:

  The notion that the loss of one English life demands the wanton sacrifice of hundreds of Indian lives is a mischievous and mistaken notion, and it ought not to influence at the least the policy of the British government.

  The Raj, he concluded, depended for its survival on an appreciation by Indians of its sense of justice, fair play and ‘Britain’s freedom from racialism’.59 All had been thrown into question by the events in the Punjab. The pro-Dyer Spectator blamed the whole sorry business on the pusillanimity of Montagu, whose ‘inability to say “No” to traitors and conspirators’ was the source of all the recent unrest. In the Commons debate he had sounded like an ‘Asiatic agitator’, and had lost the support of the British community in India and the confidence of the princes. As a Secretary of State he was no more than a ‘Bolshevik Pasha dealing out revolutionary generalities with the insolence of a tyrant on the divan’.60

  IV

  This combination of two hateful stereotypes, like the language of others in the Dyer camp, reveals why the Amritsar incident generated so much passion, and sheds considerable light on why the general behaved as he did. Throughout 1919 and 1920 the pre-war order had come under a systematic and unrelenting assault. At home (as in India) there had been mutinies among soldiers impatient for their discharge, an upsurge in Trade Union militancy, and, most dangerous of all, the onset of Sinn Féin’s terrorist war against what remained of British government in southern Ireland. Abroad, there were anti-British riots in Egypt, tumults in India and, at the end of May 1920, an Arab rebellion against the Anglo-Indian administration of Iraq. The British army of occupation in Constantinople, like the rest of the Allied forces engaged in the emasculation and partition of Asia Minor, found themselves on a collision course with the Turkish national movement led by Kamal Atatürk. The coincidence of these violent movements and their common anti-British objective nourished the growth of conspiracy theories. During the Commons Dyer debate, Carson had linked unrest in India with its manifestations elsewhere and accepted that all were part of a world-wide plot against the empire. It went without saying in conservative circles that this intrigue was being masterminded in Moscow where, for the past eighteen months, Comintern had been preaching world revolution. R
ight-wing newspapers, politicians, generals and intelligence officers in Whitehall and Simla invariably detected the hand of Communism behind every expression of anti-British sentiment.

  A further, sinister dimension had been given to this conspiracy by the circulation of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a fabrication of Czarist anti-Semites that had allegedly uncovered a Jewish plot for world domination which involved the overthrow of the British Empire. The Morning Post had given much space to this nonsense, and among the donors to the Dyer fund were ‘a believer in the Jewish peril’ and another in the ‘Hun–Jew peril’. The fact that Montagu was a Jew would not have been lost on these two dupes. For them and others host to similar phantoms, the Jewish international conspiracy and the Bolshevik were one and the same.

  Paranoia about Russian intrigue was rife in India. Its agents had been busy on the Russian–Persian frontier since the middle of 1918, first sniffing out Turko-German subversion and, after November, keeping an eye on the Bolsheviks. Attention centred on the activities of the Tashkent Press Bureau, an offshoot of Comintern, which was run by Manabendra Nath Roy. In his teens he had been associated with Bengali terrorists and had travelled in the Far East and America, seeking to purchase arms. He joined the Mexican Communist party and made his way to Moscow, where he met Lenin. Afterwards he remarked: ‘I have had the rare privilege of being treated as an equal by a great man.’61 He ran the University of Toilers of the East in Moscow and then shifted to Tashkent to work with a small band of Indian Communist and Turkish Muslim propagandists, who had been generously provided with a Russian wireless transmitter. Its audience must have been tiny, given the number of receivers in India, but its messages were picked up by military intelligence. Among the broadcasts made during the first half of 1920 were claims that the British were poised to annex Afghanistan and Persia as a springboard for an invasion of Turkmenistan, and reports of strikes in India, British artillery fire smashing workers’ barricades, and further massacres in the Punjab, where officials were said to have remarked that the only way to deal with crowds was to shoot them.62 A ‘revolutionary spirit is rampant in the East’, proclaimed the Tashkent-produced Communist in July 1920; ‘the British Empire in the East was and is in jeopardy’.63 There was also, and this might have been ill-received in some quarters in India, a proto-feminist appeal which began: