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Some Little Known Facts about Jallianwala Massacre

  Very few people in India, perhaps none abroad, know as to why General Dyer ordered massacre of innocent men women and children on April 13 1919, the Baisakhi day. Here are some important little known or unknown facts which resulted in the massacre of more than 500 and serious bullet injuries to more than 1500, mostly citizens of Amritsar who had gathered there to listen to Gandhi and other leaders against what Gandhi called “Devilish” piece of legislation ie. two Bills under Rowlett Act.

 Arthur Herman, the author of Book “Gandhi and Churchill, describes the event before massacre of hundreds of innocent Indians gathered in Jallianwala Bagh as under:

‘ Winston Churchill told the House of Commons , “Never has there been a time when people (Indians) were more disposed to turn to courses of violence or show such scant respect for law and custom , tradition and procedure.” To ally the fears of men like Churchill Indian government officials decided to act.’

In February 1919, as the Defense of India Act was to expire six months after the war; two bills by Sydney Rowlett, reached the Legislative Council in Delhi; “an outery began. Even with every Indian member (of legislative council) voting against it the bills were passed in March and became law. The two bills contained two controversial provisions. One allowed judges to convict suspected terrorist or subversives without a Jury, the other sanctioned interning those same suspects without trial.”

Gandhi thought by supporting British war effort India would get independence (Swaraj) or at least Home rule. So Gandhi had enthusiastically supported the British Empire in their war against Germany. He even went so far as to recruit 20 able-bodied persons from each village in Gujarat and walked for hundreds of miles. At the end he could recruit only forty instead of more than a thousand. He justified his war effort to the annoyance of his close associate (Sardar) Patel, who refused to be a party to that effort of Gandhi, due to twist in his philosophy of Ahimsa- Annie Besant sarcastically called Gandhi “Recruiting sergeant” of British Empire. Even many villagers felt ashamed of their Gandhi’s support to British and left his meetings or showed their back.

Gandhi justified his pro British stand. Gandhi went so far as to say “Of all my activities I regard this (recruitment) as the most difficult and the most important.”

It is surprising that there is no mention of Gandhi being pro-British upto 1919 in the ‘Advanced History of India’ by Dr R C Majumdar and others, and also Gandhi going to many villages to recruit as soldiers for British-Indian Army and the sarcastic remark of Annie Besant, that Gandhi was “Recruiting Sergeant” for the British.

It is noteworthy that Gandhi’s pro-British views in 1914 to 1919 were in absolute contrast to Annie Besant’s views…. Annie Besant a British citizen who came to India and after seeing extreme poverty in villages and the conditions of vast majority of Indians, the repressive imperialist rule by the same British who were just and democratic in their own country, got so perturbed that she started ‘Home Rule India’ party. She wanted British to concede independence to India. She said “The moment of England’s difficulty is the moment of India’s opportunity.” But Gandhi differed with her and wanted India to support British war effort “unconditionally, spiritually and physically.” Lokmanya Tilak was released from jail after the 1^st world war started in 1914. Tilak wanted like many other Indians British to concede ‘Home Rule’ to India, if not independence, just now. He therefore joined Annie Besant’s Party. As a result within one year, Annie Besant’s ‘Home Rule League’ had more than 60,000 full time members while “Indian National Congress had only 20,000 members.”

However after the end of war with Germany, British Government and in particular imperialist Winston Churchill went back from their promise of conceding Home Rule to Indians. This made Indian National Congress furious and Gandhi, too, felt betrayed by British. So he joined the independence movement of Congress and was going to address congress sponsored meeting at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, just, adjoining the Golden Temple the holiest Sikh Gurdwara. But on way Gandhi was taken out of train before reaching Amritsar, arrested and taken to Bombay. Punjab Government, as well as the British Government of Delhi kept this and Jallianwala massacre and meeting as top secret and did not let anyone know for couple of months.

In brief here is sequence of Jallianwala Bagh Massacre on 13^th April 1919: Dyer entered (Amritsar) city central with a convoy of Armoured cars, his troops following. With him was the Amritsar town “crier.” He was shouting Dyers order in Hindi and Punjabi, English and Urdu. “On reaching his temporary headquarters, he learnt that a demonstration was under way in Jallianwala Bagh. He became furious, rather lost balance, at the “deliberate violation” of his order and immediately marched with “ninety Baluchis and Gurkhas towards Jallianwala Bagh where thousands of citizens had gathered to protest against the ‘devilish’ provisions of Rowlett Act. With Dyer were only four British, two officers and two security guards. ‘Otherwise there were no white soldiers at all.’

Arthur Herman describes the order of Dyer as under:

“Dyer barked the order to open fire. For ten minutes Dyer encouraged his soldiers to keep shooting unless bodies carpeted the ground.” Dyer and his troops had marched off after completing the massacre in Jallianwala Bagh leaving about a thousand dead and more than 2000 wounded. “Cries of pain and moans rose to the roof tops, bodies lined the entire wall around the Bagh. In many places the eyewitnesses said, they were ten feet deep.”

Where an English woman had been pulled from her bicycle, “Dyer ordered every citizen of Amritsar to ‘crawl on all fours”. He also set up a whipping post where any ‘native’ who refused to crawl was to be flogged.

‘Gandhi did not hear of this massacre and cruelty at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar ‘until June’. For almost two months there was complete clampdown. But as the news of worst ever British tyranny trickled there were unceasing protests and cries all over India.

Jallianwala Bagh massacre united all Indians against British, for the first time. Rabindra Nath Tagore returned his knighthood in protest, Gandhi returned his Kaisar-e Hind medal that was awarded for his pro-British services in South Africa. Jinnaha relinquished his membership of imperial legislature. Motilal Nehru collected his British furniture, suits and ties and made bonfire in his home garden and started wearing hand span Khadi clothes.

“The evidence was harrowing. Eyewitnesses who had watched the Jallianwala Bagh killings from the rooftops had seen “blood pouring in profusion…even those who were lying down were shot….Some had their head cut open, others had eyes shot and nose, chest, arms or legs shattered.” Some witnesses had sat all night in the Bagh with dying husbands and brothers. Others remembered the bodies of those who had been shot, but managed to escape, being left in the street for dead-including the bodies of small children.”

 “At one point an entire wedding party had been flogged for failing to follow the crawling order.”

 The pain and cries because of more than a thousand deaths in Amritsar “united Indians as never before and after”. More than any other events “Amritsar and its aftermath solidified national support for Indian independence.

February 26, 2010 Posted by Har Charan Singh | Achievers, Biography, India, Indian History, Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa,Political Commentary, Politics, Punjabi, World, World History | 500 people killed 1500 seriously wounded, Annie Besant comment - Gandhi “Recruiting sergeant” of British Empire, Arthur Herman, ‘Home Rule’ to India after world war 1, Facts about Jallianwala Massacre, Gandhi and Churchill, Gathering at Jallianwala Bagh for Gandhi Speech against Rowlett Act, General Dyer 13 April 1919, India British Empire in their war against Germany, sequence of Jallianwala Bagh Massacre on 13th April 1919 | 3 Comments

H C Singh

   

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre (also known as the Amritsar massacre), took place in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden in the northern Indian city of Amritsar on 13 April 1919. The shooting that took place was ordered by Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer.
On Sunday, 13 April 1919, Dyer was convinced of a major insurrection and thus he banned all meetings. On hearing that a meeting of 15,000 to 20,000 people including women, children and the elderly had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer went with fifty riflemen to a raised bank and ordered them to shoot at the crowd. Dyer continued the firing for about ten minutes, until the ammunition supply was almost exhausted; Dyer stated that 1,650 rounds had been fired, a number which seems to have been derived by counting empty cartridge cases picked up by the troops.[1] Official British Indian sources gave a figure of 379 identified dead,[1] with approximately 1,100 wounded. The casualty number estimated by the Indian National Congress was more than 1,500, with approximately 1,000 dead.

http://global-chessboard.blogspot.in/2013/04/double-standards-europeans-are-right-to.html?spref=fb

A defaced picture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel goes up in flames during an anti-bailout protest outside of the Cyprus parliament in Nicosia on April 4, 2013.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has tenaciously insisted that austerity is the only way out of the crisis for ailing EU countries. She doesn't practice what she preaches in Germany, though, which makes growing anger toward her understandable.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was reportedly livid that paparazzi stalked her during her recent Easter vacation on the Italian island of Ischia, circulating revealing photos of her patchwork family. But she should be happy that it was only paparazzi, and not an incensed Italian mob.

Merkel currently holds the title of the most hated figure in Europe outside of her native Germany. She is viewed as the woman with the whip, the domina from Deutschland, the one who bullies all of the ailing euro-zone members into accepting hardship. She forces them to tighten their belts at risk of social and economic collapse -- and sometimes beyond. She forces Greece and Cyprus to take extreme measures -- though even this won't win them forgiveness for their inefficiency and unscrupulous financial conduct. In fact, the tough measures make the painful Agenda 2010 welfare and labor market reforms introduced by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder a decade ago seem like a wellness program. If Merkel were to force Germans to endure the kinds of measures she has been demanding from the rest of Europe, they too would take to the streets, setting piles of tires alight.

Still, it's pointless to take a stance in the dispute over whether herausterity diktat is the right policy. Perhaps those who fervently criticize what they see as Europe-impoverishing policies are right, such as Nobel Prize laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. But maybe the advisers recommending exactly this course to Merkel are right, too.

The Chancellor with the Forked Tongue

One doesn't have to have a Nobel Prize in economics or be one of the chancellor's advisers, though. It's enough just to look at Merkel's own policies for Germany to recognize that something just isn't right. The chancellor speaks with a forked tongue and applies double standards. While she wants other Europeans to make due with less, she wants her own people to have their cake and eat it too.

The first example is how Merkel deals with savers. On an evening in early October 2008, when the financial crisis was about to take Germany in its grip, Chancellor Merkel stood before the cameras with Peer Steinbrück, her then-finance minister, and declared that German savings accounts were safe. Of course, even Thomas de Maizière, Merkel's then-chief of staff and current defense minister, has acknowledged that this guarantee had no real grounding in reality. But the message was, and has continued to be: We won't touch your savings, no matter what.

The case is completely different when it comes to Cyprus, though. There, Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble, her current finance minister, number among those who initially wanted to have small-time savers involved in the deal to bail out the country's banks, though they ultimately settled for only involving bank customers with deposits of over €100,000 ($130,000). Of course, Merkel and Schäuble dispute accusations that they were the driving forces behind efforts to go after the money of individuals with smaller deposits. But two things speak against that: First, there is no written proof of their opposition to such a move. And, second, it is utterly inconceivable that something would get so close to being agreed upon without the German government's support.

Plenty of Stimulus in Germany

The second example is how Merkel deals with economic stimulus programs. In the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse, when the financial crisis was also threatening Germany, Merkel reached deep into the state coffers. She allotted €1.5 billion to a car-scrapping bonus plan to keep the country's leading industry from getting bogged down by the crisis. More than half a million used cars were crushed by the junk press, and 600,000 new cars were purchased, each of them subsidized by €2,500 in government funds. Granted, the glut of cars sold in that period has led to a saturated market that now has German automakers somewhat worried. But the measure still proved to be a success.

At the same time, Merkel's government launched a €50 billion economic stimulus program for investments in roads, buildings and seemingly everything else imaginable. Even today, new school buildings that owe their existence to this aid package are under construction and keeping German builders well fed.

But when it comes to Germany's suffering neighbors, Merkel adamantly opposes the use of economic stimulus. In her view, they need to make cuts until it hurts, slash public services and, of course, refrain from giving any industries the type of cushy deals that her government has given to Germany's automotive or hospitality sectors, for example.

Justified Anger

The question is not about whether Krugman is right when he almost obsessively labels Merkel "dim-witted" and writes that "senior German officials are living in Wolkenkuckucksheim -- cloud-cuckoo land." A lot of criticism from prominent individuals can sometimes indicate just how correct one's policies are. And it wasn't necessarily misleading when the British weekly The Economist published one of the best magazine covers of recent years last June, on which a tanker labeled "The World Economy" is sinking into the ocean and a speech balloon coming out of it asks: "Please can we start the engines now, Mrs. Merkel?"

No, it is not the know-it-alls from abroad who spark doubts. It is Merkel's own policies here at home that prove the error of the measures she champions for the ailing economies of Southern Europe -- and feed the suspicion that the outrage directed at the German taskmaster is wholly justified.

Christoph Schwennicke is editor-in-chief of the German political magazine "Cicero."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/commentary-merkel-deserves-criticism-for-double-standards-in-crisis-a-893825.html