The Amritsar Massacre.
Introduction
from Chronology
In Amritsar in the Punjab, India, soldiers under the command of
Brigadier General Reginald Dyer – without warning - open fire on a large crowd
of peaceful, unarmed civilians in the Jallianwalla
Bagh (a large public walled garden) killing officially 379 people and wounding
approximately 2000. (Some sources put
the number of fatalities and casualties much higher.) This act of mass killing became known as the Amritsar Massacre.
More Detail
The British at first tried to whitewash this massacre but, as the
details of the massacre emerged, Dyer was relieved of his command and he was
censured by the House of Commons. Montagu (Liberal Secretary of State for
India) was on the receiving end of a number of anti-Semitic attacks from the
‘die-hard’ right wing of the Conservative Party for supporting the motion to
censure Dyer. (Montagu was Jewish.) However, Dyer was promptly exonerated by the
House of Lords and allowed to retire on a large pension. When he died in 1927, he was given a hero’s
funeral.
Morgan notes that “The fate of Dyer at once became a touchstone for the
die-hard sentiment about the tone of British rule in India”. In the British House of Commons, on July 8th
1920, Churchill said that the massacre at Amritsar was an exception “without
precedent or parallel” in the history of the British empire. Satia comments “But
in fact the precedents were many, and Churchill had participated in a few
himself”. (Satia
gives details a number of these precedents in her book.) She also quotes the future Indian prime
minister Jawaharlal Nehru as saying that the “cold blooded approval of the
deed” had shocked him into realising “how brutal and immoral imperialism was,
and how it had eaten into the souls of the British upper classes”.
Dyer has been educated at Midleton College,
Cork. The Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab at the time of the massacre,
Michael O’Dwyer (who supported Dyer throughout), was
born in Tipperary into a Catholic family.
O’Dwyer was assassinated by an Indian nationalist,
Udham Singh, in London in March 1940.