Jallianwala Bagh massacre

Background

The massacre took place against the backdrop of unrest over the Rowlatt Act, emergency wartime legislation extended into peacetime that allowed indefinite detention without trial and provoked hartals and protests across India in early 1919, coordinated in part by Gandhi's newly launched satyagraha campaign against the act. Punjab had already seen large protests and rioting in early April, following the arrest and removal from Amritsar of two local nationalist leaders, Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satya Pal, whose detention triggered violent clashes in the city, including attacks on Europeans, the killing of several British bank employees, and the assault of a British missionary, Marcella Sherwood. The provincial administration, under Lieutenant-Governor Michael O'Dwyer, responded by placing Amritsar under effective martial law and banning public gatherings and processions. On 13 April, the Sikh festival of Baisakhi, several thousand people gathered at Jallianwala Bagh, a walled enclosure of several acres with few exits, close to the Golden Temple. Accounts differ on how many present were aware of the assembly ban, since it had been announced by proclamation rather than published widely, and a substantial number of those present were pilgrims and visitors in the city for the festival and an associated cattle fair rather than deliberate political protesters.

The massacre

Dyer arrived at the garden with roughly ninety soldiers, mostly Gurkha and Baluchi riflemen, positioned them at the single main entrance, which he blocked with armoured cars too wide to pass through the narrow lane leading in, and without ordering the crowd to disperse or issuing any warning, gave the command to open fire directly into the packed gathering. Firing continued for approximately ten minutes until ammunition was nearly exhausted, directed at the densest parts of the crowd and toward the narrow exits through which people were trying to flee, rather than into the air or the ground. A number of victims died in a well within the enclosure where they had jumped to escape the gunfire. Dyer later testified before the Hunter Commission that he had intended the action to produce a "moral effect" across Punjab rather than simply to disperse the gathering, and that he would have used the mounted machine guns on his armoured cars had the entrance been wide enough to bring them in. No warning was given before firing began, and no arrangements were made for medical assistance to the wounded afterward; a curfew imposed on the city that evening further hindered efforts to help the injured or recover the dead.

Inquiry and aftermath

Beyond the massacre itself, Dyer's martial-law regime in Amritsar in the following days imposed further humiliations, including an order requiring Indians to crawl on their hands and knees along the lane where Marcella Sherwood had been attacked, and public floggings, measures that deepened outrage once they became known. The government of India appointed the Hunter Commission, chaired by Lord Hunter, to investigate the disorders in Punjab and the official response to them. Its report was divided along largely predictable lines: the majority, including its British members, found Dyer's action excessive and recommended no further employment for him, while a minority report by the Indian members on the commission went further in condemnation, characterizing the firing as an inhumane and unnecessary act of retribution. Dyer was relieved of his command and, though he faced no criminal or court-martial proceedings, his career effectively ended. Opinion in Britain itself split sharply: he was censured in a Commons debate led by Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, who called the episode "a monstrous event," but Dyer received strong support in the House of Lords and from a substantial public subscription fund raised in his favour by sympathetic sections of British opinion, organized in part through the Morning Post newspaper. Michael O'Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor who had approved the broader martial law regime in Punjab and publicly defended Dyer's action, was assassinated in London in March 1940 by Udham Singh, an Indian revolutionary who had reportedly been present in Jallianwala Bagh as a young man and who described the killing as retribution for the massacre.

Political consequences and historiography

The massacre transformed Indian nationalist politics. Rabindranath Tagore renounced the knighthood he had received from the British Crown in protest. Mohandas Gandhi, who had until then generally cooperated with the colonial government, moved toward the Non-Cooperation Movement launched in 1920, citing Jallianwala Bagh together with the broader Punjab disturbances as evidence that reform within the imperial framework could not be trusted. The exact death toll remains disputed: the Hunter Commission's figure of 379 dead is generally regarded by historians as an undercount, since it relied on incomplete official records, while contemporary Indian National Congress estimates and later Indian government estimates have put the number considerably higher, into four figures; no precise, universally accepted figure exists. The massacre is widely treated, across the political spectrum in India, as a decisive rupture in relations between Indians and the colonial state, though historians differ on how directly it should be read as a cause of eventual independence as opposed to one contributing factor among many.