Jallianwala Bagh massacre

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 13th of April 1919, a crowd gathered inside a walled garden in Amritsar to do two things: celebrate the Baisakhi harvest festival and protest a law they believed stripped them of basic rights. What happened next would shake the Indian subcontinent to its foundations. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer arrived at the Jallianwala Bagh with fifty armed troops, blocked the exits, and ordered them to open fire without warning. The troops kept shooting for approximately ten minutes, stopping only when their ammunition was nearly exhausted. The dead included a six-week-old baby. How did a colonial administration arrive at a moment of such extreme violence against its own subjects? And why, more than a century later, has Britain still never formally apologised?

• 2. The Laws That Lit the Fuse

  ›

  During World War I, millions of Indian soldiers and labourers served in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The Indian administration sent food, money, and ammunition on a massive scale. Yet within India, the British were simultaneously tightening their grip. Bengal and Punjab had long been centres of anti-colonial activity, and British intelligence had thwarted a planned pan-Indian mutiny set for February 1915 by infiltrating the Ghadar Movement and arresting key figures. The Defence of India Act 1915, which restricted civil and political liberties, was partly a response to that threat. Michael O'Dwyer, then Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, was one of its strongest advocates.

  By 1918, conditions across India had deteriorated sharply. Casualties from the war were high, inflation had risen steeply after the armistice, heavy taxation drained ordinary people, and the deadly 1918 flu pandemic added to the suffering. The Indian National Congress had reunified after years of internal division, and Mahatma Gandhi, recently returned to India, was emerging as a charismatic leader of civil disobedience. The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1917 had promised some political change, but many in the independence movement considered the concessions wholly inadequate.

  Into this volatile atmosphere, the Rowlatt Act arrived in 1919. It extended the wartime emergency restrictions on civil liberties into peacetime. Muhammad Ali Jinnah resigned from his Bombay seat in protest, writing to the Viceroy that "a Government that passes or sanctions such a law in times of peace forfeits its claim to be called a civilised government." Gandhi called for protests, and the response was enormous. The unrest was particularly acute in Punjab, where O'Dwyer believed the province was on the edge of a coordinated revolt modelled on the 1857 uprising.

• 3. The Garden and the Trap

  ›

  The Jallianwala Bagh is an enclosed open area near the Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. Roughly 200 by 200 yards in size, it is surrounded on all sides by walls about ten feet high. It had five narrow entrances, most of them kept permanently locked. Balconies of three- and four-storey houses overlooked it from above. In the centre sat a samadhi, a cremation site, and a large well measuring about twenty feet in diameter, partly filled with water.

  On the morning of the 13th of April 1919, Dyer moved through Amritsar announcing a ban on public meetings of four or more people, a curfew beginning at 20:00, and a pass system for entering or leaving the city. The proclamation was read in English, Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi. Many people either missed it or disregarded it. The city had also filled up with farmers, traders, and merchants for the annual Baisakhi horse and cattle fair. When police closed that fair at 14:00, many of those attending drifted directly into the Bagh.

  Dyer arranged for an aeroplane to estimate the crowd size and was told approximately 6,000 people were present. The Hunter Commission would later put the figure at between 10,000 and 20,000. An hour after the scheduled 17:30 start of the meeting, Dyer arrived with fifty troops carrying .303 Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifles. He had also brought two armoured cars armed with machine guns, but the vehicles could not pass through the narrow entrances. Dyer stationed his soldiers at the main exit and gave the order to fire toward the densest sections of the crowd, where panicked people were already pressing toward the narrow gates to escape.

• 4. The Counting of the Dead

  ›

  The following morning's newspapers quoted an Associated Press figure of 200 casualties. That figure was wrong, and the Government of Punjab made no serious effort to correct it. When members of the Hunter Commission later interviewed a senior Punjab civil servant, he admitted the true toll could be much higher. The Sewa Samiti society conducted its own independent investigation and reached 379 deaths and 192 seriously wounded. The Hunter Commission, working from those same figures, estimated the total injured at roughly three times the number killed, suggesting approximately 1,500 casualties.

  At the Imperial Legislative Council meeting on the 12th of September 1919, an investigation led by Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya concluded that 42 boys were among the dead, the youngest of them only seven months old. The Hunter Commission confirmed the deaths of 337 men, 41 boys, and a six-week-old baby. Gathering accurate figures proved nearly impossible. Three months after the massacre, officials tried to compile a list by inviting residents to come forward, but many were afraid that identifying themselves as having been at the meeting would expose them to punishment.

  Historian Vishwa Nath Datta estimated 700 killed. Madan Mohan Malaviya put the figure at 1,000. The Indian National Congress, after conducting its own inquiry, concluded that more than 1,500 had been killed, with approximately 1,000 deaths. Nationalist Swami Shraddhanand wrote to Gandhi citing 1,500 deaths. A plaque placed at the Bagh after Indian independence states that 120 bodies were recovered from the well alone. The curfew Dyer imposed that night was earlier than usual, which meant the wounded could not be moved and many died where they had fallen.

• 5. Dyer's Own Words

  ›

  On the 19th of November 1919, Dyer was called before the Hunter Commission. He refused the suggestion from his military superiors that he have legal counsel present and appeared alone. He told the commission he had known about the Bagh meeting since 12:40 that day, yet had made no effort to prevent it or disperse the crowd before opening fire. He stated plainly: "I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing, but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself."

  The commission's questioning pressed further. Sir Chimanlal Setalvad asked whether Dyer would have opened fire with the armoured car machine guns had the vehicles been able to enter the compound. Dyer replied, "I think probably, yes." When asked whether casualties would then have been much higher, he confirmed they would. He said his intention had not been to disperse the meeting but "to punish the Indians for disobedience." He stated that his goal had been to strike terror throughout Punjab and to reduce the moral stature of those he called rebels. He also confirmed he had made no effort to provide medical help after the shooting: "Certainly not. It was not my job. Hospitals were open and they could have gone there."

  In an article he wrote in the Globe on the 21st of January 1921, titled "The Peril to the Empire", Dyer declared: "India does not want self-government. She does not understand it." He wrote that Gandhi would not lead India to capable self-government and that the British Raj must continue. The Hunter Commission's report, released on the 8th of March 1920 and comprising six volumes of evidence, unanimously condemned his actions. The final report found no conspiracy to overthrow British rule in Punjab and concluded that Dyer had committed "a grave error" by continuing to fire as long as he did. He was relieved of his command on the 23rd of March.

• 6. Tagore, Udham Singh, and the Long Reckoning

  ›

  Rabindranath Tagore received news of the massacre by the 22nd of May 1919. He had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature and held a British knighthood. He tried to arrange a protest meeting in Calcutta and then decided that renouncing the knighthood was a more fitting act of solidarity. In a letter dated the 31st of May 1919 and addressed to Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, Tagore wrote: "The enormity of the measures taken by the Government in Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has, with a rude shock, revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India."

  Udham Singh had been present at the Bagh on the 13th of April 1919 and had been wounded in the shooting. For more than two decades he pursued a specific target: Michael O'Dwyer, the lieutenant-governor who had approved Dyer's actions. On the 13th of March 1940, at Caxton Hall in London, Singh shot and killed O'Dwyer. At his trial, Singh told the court: "I did it because I had a grudge against him. He deserved it. He was the real culprit. He wanted to crush the spirit of my people, so I have crushed him. For full 21 years, I have been trying to wreak vengeance."

  Singh was hanged on the 31st of July 1940. Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi both condemned the murder as senseless even while acknowledging its courage. By 1952, Nehru, then Prime Minister, had honoured Singh with a formal tribute, and Singh received the title of Shaheed, the name given to someone who has attained martyrdom on behalf of their country or religion. Reporter and historian William L. Shirer wrote the day after the Caxton Hall shooting that when he had visited Amritsar in 1930, eleven years after the massacre, the bitterness still stuck in the people there.

• 7. The Apology Never Given

  ›

  Winston Churchill had condemned the massacre in the House of Commons on the 8th of July 1920 as "unutterably monstrous", and MPs voted 247 to 37 against Dyer. Yet news of what had happened at the Bagh did not reach Britain until December 1919, eight months after the shooting. And despite Churchill's denunciation, many Britons still regarded Dyer as a hero who had saved British rule in India. Marcella Sherwood, the English missionary who had been attacked in Amritsar days before the massacre, later described Dyer as "the saviour of the Punjab".

  Queen Elizabeth II visited Jallianwala Bagh on the 14th of October 1997 and paid her respects with a 30-second moment of silence. She removed her shoes and laid a wreath of marigolds. The previous evening, at a state banquet, she had described the massacre as "a distressing example" of difficult episodes in the shared history of Britain and India, and said that "history cannot be rewritten, however much we might sometimes wish otherwise." Her husband Prince Philip, during the same visit, disputed the plaque's claim that about two thousand people had died, saying the figure "must include the wounded" and citing a conversation he said he had with Dyer's son while in the Navy. Indian journalist Praveen Swami wrote in Frontline magazine that Philip's comment suggested the death of 379 people was somehow inadequate to appall the royal conscience.

  David Cameron became the first serving British prime minister to visit the site, in February 2013, describing the massacre as "a deeply shameful event in British history." He did not deliver a formal apology. Theresa May, visiting the centenary ceremony on the 12th of April 2019, called the shooting of unarmed civilians a "shameful scar" but also stopped short of an apology. Britain has expressed "regret" but has never formally said sorry. The memorial itself, designed by American architect Benjamin Polk, was inaugurated on the 13th of April 1961 by President Rajendra Prasad in the presence of Jawaharlal Nehru. The bullet marks remain on the walls of the Bagh to this day.