India, Old and New

by Sir Valentine Chirol

Had the measures taken, however stern, been confined to the repression of actual violence and to the punishment of the guilty, the reaction produced amongst the great majority of Indians by the atrocities which Indian mobs had committed, and the appalling spirit of lawlessness which inspired them, would probably have been at least as great as the impression which they at first made upon Mr. Gandhi himself, who suddenly recognised and admitted that he had underrated the "forces of evil" and advised his disciples to co-operate, as he himself had done at Ahmedabad, with Government in the restoration of order. The Satyagraha Committee, of which he was President, resolved to suspend temporarily "civil disobedience" to the laws, and the fraternisation between Mahomedans and Hindus cooled down, when important Mahomedan associations began to protest against the desecration of mosques by the admission of Hindu "idolaters" to deliver fiery orations to mixed congregations within the sacred precincts. But before the reaction could take real effect, it was arrested by rumours of terrible happenings in the course of the repression in the Punjab which turned the tide of Indian feeling into an opposite direction, and for those rumours there ultimately proved to have been no slight foundation.

The methods adopted in the Punjab had been very different from those adopted in the Bombay Presidency, where there had been scarcely less menacing outbursts in some of the northern districts, besides serious rioting in Bombay itself. In Ahmedabad, the second city of the Presidency, mob law reigned for two days. There were arson and pillage, and murder of Europeans and Government officers. Troops had to be hurried up to quell the disturbances, and for a short time the military authorities had to take charge. The repression was stern; 28 of the rioters were killed and 123 wounded in Ahmedabad alone. There were many arrests and prosecutions. But those stormy days left no bitterness behind them. The use of military force was not resented, because it was directed only against the crowds actually engaged in violent rioting. Martial law was never proclaimed, nor did the military authorities prolong the exercise of their punitive powers beyond the short period of active disorder, nor strain it beyond the measures essential to the suppression of disorder. They never interfered in administrative matters. The Bombay Government kept their heads, and there was nowhere any wholesale surrender of the civil authority into military hands. Mr. Gandhi, who had been turned back by the Punjab Government when he tried to enter the Punjab, was left free by the Bombay Government, and the value of his assistance in restoring order in Allahabad, whilst he was in his first fit of penitence, was acknowledged by the authorities.

Very different was the intensive enforcement of martial law in the Punjab. Even when all allowance is made for the more dangerous situation created by a more martial population and the proximity of an always turbulent North-Western Frontier with the added menace at that time of an Afghan invasion, nothing can justify what was done at Amritsar where the deliberate bloodshed at Jallianwala has marked out April 13, 1919, as a black day in the annals of British India. One cannot possibly realise the frightfulness of it until one has actually looked down on the Jallianwala Bagh—once a garden, but in modern times a waste space frequently used for fairs and public meetings, about the size perhaps of Trafalgar Square, and closed in almost entirely by walls above which rise the backs of native houses facing into the congested streets of the city. I entered by the same narrow lane by which General Dyer—having heard that a large crowd had assembled there, many doubtless in defiance, but many also in ignorance of his proclamation forbidding all public gatherings—entered with about fifty rifles. I stood on the same rising ground on which he stood when, without a word of warning, he opened fire at about 100 yards' range upon a dense crowd, collected mainly in the lower and more distant part of the enclosure around a platform from which speeches were being delivered. The crowd was estimated by him at 6000, by others at 10,000 and more, but practically unarmed, and all quite defenceless. The panic-stricken multitude broke at once, but for ten consecutive minutes he kept up a merciless fusillade—in all 1650 rounds—on that seething mass of humanity, caught like rats in a trap, vainly rushing for the few narrow exits or lying flat on the ground to escape the rain of bullets, which he personally directed to the points where the crowd was thickest. The "targets," to use his own word, were good, and when at the end of those ten minutes, having almost exhausted his ammunition, he marched his men off by the way they came, he had killed, according to the official figures only wrung out of Government months later, 379, and he left about 1200 wounded on the ground, for whom, again to use his own word, he did not consider it his "job" to take the slightest thought.

In going to Jallianwala I had passed through the streets where, on April 10, when the disorders suddenly broke out in Amritsar, the worst excesses were committed by the Indian rioters. But for General Dyer's own statements before the Hunter Commission, one might have pleaded that, left to his own unbalanced judgment by the precipitate abdication of the civil authority, he simply "saw red," though the outbreak of the 10th had been quelled before he arrived in Amritsar, and the city had been free from actual violence for the best part of three days. But, on his own showing, he deliberately made up his mind whilst marching his men to Jallianwala, and would not have flinched from still greater slaughter if the narrowness of the approaches had not compelled him regretfully to leave his machine-guns behind. His purpose, he declared, was to "strike terror into the whole of the Punjab." He may have achieved it for the time, though the evidence on this point is conflicting, but what he achieved far more permanently and effectively was to create in the Jallianwala Bagh, purchased since then as a "Martyrs' Memorial" by the Indian National Congress, a place of perpetual pilgrimage for racial hatred.

Then, two days after—not before—Jallianwala came the formal proclamation of martial law in the Punjab, and though there were no more Jallianwalas, what but racial hatred could result from a constant stream of petty and vindictive measures enforced even after the danger of rebellion, however real it may at first have seemed, had passed away? Sir Michael O'Dwyer protested, it is true, against General Dyer's monstrous "crawling order," and it was promptly disallowed. But what of many other "orders" which were not disallowed? What of the promiscuous floggings and whippings, the indiscriminate arrests and confiscations, the so-called "fancy punishments" designed not so much to punish individual "rebels" as to terrorise and humiliate? What of the whole judicial or quasi-judicial administration of martial law? The essential facts are on record now in the Report of the Hunter Committee and in the evidence taken before it, though its findings were not entirely unanimous and the majority report of the European members, five in number including the president Lord Hunter, formerly Solicitor-General for Scotland, was accompanied by a minority report signed by the three Indian members, two of them now Ministers in the Government of Bombay and of the United Provinces respectively, who on several points attached graver importance to the circumstances which they themselves had chiefly helped to elicit from witnesses under examination. Upon the Report the Government of India and His Majesty's Government expressed in turn their views in despatches which are also public property. The responsibility of the Government of India was so deeply involved, and in a lesser degree that of the Secretary of State, that in neither case was judgment likely to err on the side of severity. The Government of India certainly did not so err, and one must turn to the despatch embodying the views of the British Government for a considered judgment which at least set forth in weighty terms the principles of British policy that had been violated in the Punjab, however short some may consider it to have fallen of the full requirements of justice in appraising the gravity of the departure from those principles in specific cases.

The Punjab tragedy has had such far-reaching effects in shaking the confidence of the Indian people in the justice and even in the humanity of British rule that it is best to quote the language in which the British Government recorded their judgment in their despatch to the Government of India:

The principle which has consistently governed the policy of His Majesty's Government in directing the methods to be employed, when military action in support of civil authority is required, may be broadly stated as using the minimum force necessary. His Majesty's Government are determined that this principle shall remain the primary factor of policy whenever circumstances unfortunately necessitate the suppression of civil disorder by military force within the British Empire.

It must regretfully but without possibility of doubt be concluded that Brigadier-General Dyer's action at Jallianwala Bagh was in complete violation of this principle.

The despatch proceeded to take into account the provocation offered and the great difficulties of the position in which General Dyer was placed. His omission to give warning before opening fire was nevertheless declared to have been "inexcusable," his failure to see that some attempt was made to give medical assistance to the dying and the wounded an "omission from his obvious duty," and the "crawling order" issued by him six days later "an offence against every canon of civilised government."

Upon a military commander administering martial law in a hostile country there lies a grave responsibility; when he is compelled to exercise this responsibility over a population which owes allegiance and looks for protection to the Government which he himself is serving, this burden is immeasurably enhanced. It would prejudice the public safety, with the preservation of which he is charged, to fetter his free judgment or action either by the prescription of rigid rules before the event or by over-censorious criticism when the crisis is past. A situation which is essentially military must be dealt with in the light of military considerations which postulate breadth of view and due appreciation of all the possible contingencies. There are certain standards of conduct which no civilised Government can with impunity neglect and which His Majesty's Government are determined to uphold.... That Brigadier-General Dyer displayed honesty of purpose and unflinching adherence to his conception of his duty cannot for a moment be questioned. But his conception of his duty in the circumstances in which he was placed was so fundamentally at variance with that which His Majesty's Government have a right to expect from and a duty to enforce upon officers who hold His Majesty's commission that it is impossible to regard him as fitted to remain entrusted with the responsibilities which his rank and position impose upon him. You have reported to me that the Commander-in-Chief has directed Brigadier-General Dyer to resign his appointment as Brigade Commander, and has informed him that he would receive no further employment in India and that you have concurred. I approve the decision and the circumstances of the case have been referred to the Army Council.