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Chapter 4 Martial Law and Massacre: Violence and the Limit In Amritsar, 13 April 1919 was a day marked by the heat and dust characteristic of the Punjab at that time of the year. General Dyer, who had been in the city since 11 April, spent the morning marching round the city, reading a proclamation forbidding the residents from leaving the city or gathering in processions or assemblies. By 1:00 P.M., however, finding the weather too hot, he returned to his headquarters. Soon after, he received reports that an alternative procession during the morning was announcing a gathering at Jallianwala Bagh at 4:30 P.M. The city was observing the fourth consecutive day of Hartal or general strike, and there were funerals being held for people shot by the military on 10 April. Adding to this tension was the fact that many people had come into the city from out of town, as it was the day of the Baisakhi festival—the Hindu New Year. It is estimated that by the afternoon some twenty thousand people had assembled in the bagh, some in open defiance of General Dyer’s proclamation, but others merely in the spirit of the festival, as the bagh was adjacent to the holy Golden Temple. By 4:00 P.M. General Dyer received information that the meeting was being held and immediately set out with his troops and armored vehicles.1 Jallianwala Bagh was actually not a park or garden at all, but an unused ground in the shape of an irregular rectangle about 250 yards long and 200 yards wide. Houses built with their back walls to the area had effectively enclosed it on three sides. The fourth side had a boundary wall of around 5 feet, with a few narrow lanes serving as exits.2 Unable to get his armored cars through these lanes, General Dyer approached the ground on foot and stationed his troops, twenty-five on either side of him. Then without any warning he opened fire. In the 99 panic that followed, some people lay on the ground to avoid the bullets but were trampled as others rushed toward the exits. As the crowd thickened around such points, General Dyer directed the fire at them. The firing lasted for ten to fifteen minutes, and a total of 1,650 rounds of ammunition were used. Only after nearly running out of ammunition did General Dyer cease firing and withdraw, without determining the casualties or providing for any medical assistance. The official estimate later on was that 379 people had been killed, with thousands more seriously injured.3 This was the infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre, an incident that was neither the beginning nor the end of martial law, but that came to dominate the debate around the “disturbances in the Punjab.”4 “Amritsar ” became a signal event with the years, and one that was seen as contributing to the end of British rule in India, or worse, as Alfred Draper’s book Amritsar: The Massacre That Ended the Raj suggests.5 The official view was to stress the exceptionality of the event, to concentrate on Dyer’s “bad judgement” as his alone. Winston Churchill during the Commons debate on Dyer’s actions somewhat unbelievably declared it to be “without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire . . . an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.”6 The official view, which stressed the singularity of the event, insisted that what made it without parallel was not only the large number of people killed—and in this they were right—but also the flawed logic with which Dyer explained his actions. At the center of this charge was a much quoted statement from the report General Dyer made to his division command on 25 August 1919. I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed, and I consider this is the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral and widespread effect it was my duty to produce if I was to justify my action. If more troops had been at hand, the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view not only on those present, but more especially throughout the Punjab. There could be no question of undue severity.7 100 The Jurisprudence of...

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