Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 Page 9

  The afternoon meeting began quietly as the Bagh filled up. One by one, the speakers got onto the makeshift stage. Most were well-known personalities from Amritsar. Many of them interacted with the British on a daily basis—as traders, doctors, lawyers—and came from well-established families. They had no reason to suspect their white masters; why would local officials like Irving and Rehill or Plomer attack a peaceful crowd of people they knew? They had not accounted for the fact that an outsider would arrive with a clear agenda to punish them.

  The fact that the organisers of the meeting were able to erect a stage is also peculiar. If the activity was illegal, or if someone had properly understood the morning proclamation, it should have set off alarm bells. Some villagers had come with their families to attend the Baisakhi fair or ask for blessings at the Golden Temple. Jallianwala Bagh, being an open area, was a good place to catch a bit of rest before heading back to their villages. Of those killed, around 20 per cent were from outside Amritsar. Very few women (the popular narrative holds that there were women present) attended the meeting—among the dead, only two bodies of women were recovered. None of the eyewitnesses spoke of any women being present at the meeting.37

  At this point in time, most of the ‘respectable’ women of Amritsar would not be seen in public, and many observed purdah. Sarojini Naidu, in her angry speech in London in June 1920, protested the atrocities against the ‘veiled women of Punjab’ during the tragic occurrences in 1919. She said that ‘women whose face had never been seen by a stranger. . . or touched by the curious sun or the moon were dragged into the market place’ by the minions of the British government. On 13 April, most of these women in purdah would have been at home. It was Sunday, and the markets were all closed due to the hartal. They had no reason to step out.38

  But many of the young boys had headed to the Bagh, where they were easily trapped and killed. Their parents were unlikely to have stopped them because it was an ordinary occurence—they would often attend the various public functions held there, or play with their friends. One such parent lived just 100 yards away.

  It was 4 p.m. when Dr Mani Ram, a 38-year-old dental surgeon, reached the Bagh.39 A crowd of about two thousand had already gathered and someone was speaking from the raised platform. He too walked in to listen.

  The first indication that something was amiss was when an aircraft flew overhead at around 4.30 p.m. This was extremely unusual. ‘It did not hover over the meeting but turned back after taking a glimpse,’ said Rup Lal Puri, who was among the speakers on the makeshift stage, along with Dr Gurbaksh Rai.40

  Rup Lal Puri was the son of Lala Nand Lal Khatri, a merchant from Amritsar. All the men on stage were residents of Amritsar and most of them belonged to the educated elite—except Hans Raj, who had called the meeting.

  ‘I suggested that Dr Kitchlew’s photo be placed on the presidential chair. He was highly respected by the people,’ Rup Lal Puri said later.41

  Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew was remembered fondly by those present. On looking at his photograph, people would have been reminded of the unfair treatment meted out to him.

  The crowd, squatting on the ground, was listening to the speakers intently, while the children played in the Bagh. Mani Ram began looking around for his young son, but it was difficult to spot him in such a large crowd.42 Just as he was wondering how to find him, he heard what he thought were gun shots and saw people drop to the ground beside him. It is important to note from his evidence that those attending the meeting had not even seen Dyer’s arrival or heard his order to shoot. Obviously he gave no warning, or a chance to escape.

  A shocked Mani Ram found people around him dying from bullet wounds. In the brief lull in which the guns were reloaded, he ran and leapt over a low part of the wall, and returned to the safety of the stables next door. Transfixed by the horrific sight of a line of soldiers firing on the unarmed crowd, he remained in the stables. By now everyone was running for the very few, narrow openings. The main one was blocked by the soldiers kneeling in front of it, steadily firing to the command of the British officer whom they did not know or recognise. This, of course, was Dyer. He had a few other officers with him.

  Meanwhile, Rup Lal Puri, from his vantage point, had seen two constables enter the Bagh shortly after the aeroplane flew away.43 He also noted that the crowd before him was unarmed—barring a few who carried sticks. As he had been attending political meetings frequently, he was more familiar than Mani Ram with the ways of the police. He too remembered that no warning or order to disperse had been given before the shooting began.

  According to eyewitness accounts, a few minutes after the two constables left, the Gurkha sepoys, accompanied by Deputy Superintendent of Police Plomer, General Dyer, and a number of policemen, arrived. Dyer ordered the sepoys to fire. The sepoys were in line when the firing began. They were standing on a raised platform, which was higher than the dais of the meeting. The first volley passed over the seated crowd and struck the wall opposite. The sepoys were ordered to kneel down and fire.

  ‘I then jumped down from the dais onto the floor and ran. I was hit on my back. I saw a large number of people killed and wounded,’ Rup Lal Puri recalled.44

  As many of the people attending the meeting were sitting or squatting on the ground, they would have found it difficult to get up and escape. Many died on the spot. They took bullets in their back, and on their legs and even soles of their feet, as they lay flat to escape the bullets, or ran to the walls and tried to climb over or push their way through the few narrow exits on the side—which became impossible as bodies began to pile up.

  Meanwhile, Mani Ram still could not spot his 12-year-old son, Madan Mohan, in the melee. People were screaming and running for an escape route wherever they could find it. He went back into the Bagh to look for his son, once the shooting stopped.

  ‘I saw a dreadful sight. The wounded were crying and lying in heaps of blood. There were two cows which had been killed as a result of the firing. The dead and wounded were on one another and I had to look for my son among them. Some of the wounded were crying for water. There was no one to give them water. I was unable to find my son there,’ he said. It was only when he returned later in the evening, accompanied by his wife, with some water for the wounded who lay untreated in the open, that he found his son.

  He was lying dead under a pile of bodies.45

  Dyer later testified as follows:

  Q: When you got into the Bagh, what did you do?

  Dyer: I opened fire.

  Q: At once?

  Dyer: Immediately. I had thought about the matter and doubt it took me more than 30 seconds to make up my mind as to what my duty was.

  Q: As regards the crowd, what was it doing?

  Dyer: Well they were holding a meeting. There was a man in the centre of the place on something raised. His hands were moving about. He was evidently addressing. He was absolutely in the centre of the square, as far as I could judge. I should say some 50 or 60 yards from where my troops were drawn up.46

  Lord Hunter asked: ‘On the assumption that there was that risk of people being in the crowd who were not aware of the proclamation, did it not occur to you that it was a proper measure to ask the crowd to disperse before you took that step of actually firing?

  A: No, at that time I did not. I merely felt that my orders had not been obeyed, that Martial Law was flouted, and that it was my duty to fire immediately by rifle.

  Q: Before you dispersed the crowd, had the crowd taken any action at all?

  A: No sir, they had run away, a few of them.

  Q: Did they start to run away?

  A: Yes. When I began to fire, the big mob at the centre began to run almost towards the right.

  Q: Martial Law had not been proclaimed. Before you took that step which was a serious step, did you not consider as to the propriety of consulting the Deputy Commissioner who was the civil authority responsible for the order of the city?

  A: There was no Deputy Commissioner to
consult at the time. I did not think it wise to ask anybody further. I had to make up my mind immediately as to what my action should be. I considered it from the military point of view that I ought to fire immediately, that if I did not do so, I should fail in my duty. . .

  Q: In firing, was it your object to disperse?

  A: No sir. I was going to fire till they dispersed.

  Q: Did the crowd at once start to disperse as soon as you fired?

  A: Immediately.

  Q: Did you continue firing?

  A: Yes.

  Q: And after the crowd indicated that it was going to disperse, why did you not stop?

  A: I thought it was my duty to go on until it dispersed. If I fired a little, I should be wrong in firing at all.

  He also said that: ‘. . . there were no women and children in the meeting, and its appearance confirmed the reports I had received as to its character.’

  This was only partially correct—there were, actually, a large number of young boys and even babes in arms—and one witness appearing before the Congress Sub-Committee remembered seeing the bodies of up to 500 young boys strewn on the ground.

  Dyer deployed his men in two firing parties on either side of the main entrance, Gurkhas to the right and Baluchis to the left. The soldiers fired 1,650 rounds, or 33 rounds per man.

  One of the organisers of the meeting (it could have been Hans Raj) had shouted out that the British would not fire, and even if they did, blanks would be used. Plomer later claimed that Pandit Durga Dass, the editor of Waqt, may have given the false reassurance that the bullets would be blanks.47 The reason appears to be that on 6 April 1919, the Aftab newspaper had claimed that in the riots of 30 March in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk, the Gurkhas had ‘fired blank cartridges in the air’. This remark was untrue and appears now to be inexplicable. Did this article form the basis for the belief that the bullets now being fired were blank or ‘phokian’, perhaps encouraging people to remain seated and causing many more casualties? Or was the crowd told that fake bullets would be fired in order to ensure they remained seated and increase the number of casualties? Interestingly, Hans Raj escaped unscathed and hid under the platform, according to some accounts. It was a platform he had erected, possibly with this very escape in mind.

  The Hunter Committee described Dyer’s actions thus:

  He put 25 Baluchis and 25 Gurkhas on the raised ground at the entrance, and without giving any warning or asking the people to disperse, immediately opened fire at the people, who were at a distance of 100 to 150 yards. The people, as soon as the first shots were fired, began to run away through the few exits the place has got, but General Dyer continued firing till the ammunition ran short.

  Why did Dyer continue to fire for ten minutes? Over a period of time, the explanations he gave would change. But as Rupert Furneaux says, his first claim was that the crowd came surging ‘to rush’ him.48 ‘To Sir Michael O’ Dwyer he said he thought the crowd was trying to get behind him, and to General Beynon he explained he thought they were gathering for a rush, two slightly different explanations which suggest that Dyer’s memory was confused.’

  In his own initial report, he said his force was small, and ‘to hesitate might induce attack’. Which meant that he actually did not face an attack, but was concerned that any hesitation might lead to one.

  Other officers present did not remember anyone ‘gathering for a rush’.

  ‘The men did not hesitate to fire, and I saw no man firing high,’ said Captain Briggs later.49 They all fired directly into the crowd.

  The result was the bloody massacre of an unarmed crowd. Even if some in the crowd rushed towards him, it was not an attack—it was a desperate attempt to escape through the sole exit, which he and his troops had completely blocked.

  Hundreds of people present that day had experiences similar to that of Mani Ram.

  Few outsiders who were present could have left the city even after the firing stopped. Leaving the city was immensely difficult as they required passes from one among the long list of civilian authorities that Dyer had named, and, at this point, they were mostly unavailable. Many of those outsiders who had attended, including the wounded, or even local residents who survived, hid in Amritsar with anyone who gave them shelter.

  And so Jallianwala Bagh and Amritsar became enormous traps out of which people could not escape. It was a textbook military exercise on how to encircle the enemy.

  Thirty-three-year-old Pratap Singh waited till the firing squad had left, before getting up. He ‘saw bodies on all sides’.

  ‘The bodies were so thick about the passage, that I could not find my way. I had my son with me and men were rushing over the dead bodies. I took my son (Kripa Singh, nine year old) also over the dead bodies. In my opinion there must have been nearly 2000 dead in the garden. Nearly all my clothes were left behind. I never saw any lathis (sticks) the whole time I was there, neither among those sitting nor on the ground afterwards. . . as I was creeping near the dead bodies, I slipped and fell and lost hold of my son. The people behind, now began trampling all over me, and I had many blows and wounds on my chest. All my breath was taken out of me and I thought I was dying. When the rush was over, I revived and got out from amongst the dead bodies and ran into the lane. I had no dhoti, only a shirt and a coat. . . I could not speak. I was stunned and went into some house. I don’t know whose it was. Just then I heard someone saying, “They are coming again, they are coming again.” I rushed out and fled down through another lane. On the road I was so thirsty that I could not run or stand anymore. I took some water from an old woman. . . and asked her for a loin cloth. Then I began crying, “Has anyone seen my child?” but no one had seen him. I ran home and found my son had not reached there. My relations went in all directions to find him. After half an hour the boy came back himself. After that for some twenty to twenty five days I was very ill in bed and could not sit up.’50

  Most of the survivors wanted to keep their presence at the Bagh a secret. Even if badly injured or mentally stressed, like Pratap Singh, they did not go to a hospital. Several died on the streets, outside the Bagh. They succumbed to bullet wounds from the shooting inside, or after being shot at by the pickets that Dyer had placed around the city. All this meant that the final numbers of dead or wounded would never be known. There are some eyewitness who remembered people crawling out of the Bagh, seriously wounded, even days later.

  Lala Gian Chand, a 27-year-old working in a shop in Kakra Jarnail Singh, said in his evidence to the Congress Committee: ‘After the firing was over, I saw about five or six hundred persons of all ages, including the dead and the wounded, lying about in the street, outside the Bagh. I reached my house with the greatest difficulty, and there I learnt that my two nephews were not in the house. I then went back to look for them in the garden, I found my nephew’s body riddled with bullets. His skull was broken. There was one shot under his nose on the upper lips, two on the left side, one on the left (side of the) neck, and three on the thigh and some two three on the head.’51

  Many spoke of the large number of children who had been killed or wounded. Mian Sikander Ali went to the Bagh at 7.15 p.m. and discovered the dead body of his son under a pile of corpses near the wall, east of the well. He also found his cousin Ismail dead. Both had been shot in the head and the legs, probably while trying to scale the wall. He remembered: ‘There were a number of children among the dead. I saw an aged man lying prostrate on the ground with a two year old baby in his arms. Both appeared to be lifeless. The number of dead and wounded lying in the garden, was about two thousand.’ He recollected that there was no one to help as they removed the corpses.52

  Sardar Partap Singh’s son, Sundar Singh, had attended the meeting—but Partap Singh himself did not go. As he ran to the Bagh after hearing the sound of firing, he saw many wounded people lying on the streets. He hid from the soldiers who were coming out of the Bagh, and then jumped over the wall. ‘Dead bodies were lying on all sides near the enclosure walls.
When I entered, a dying man asked for water. There is a drain which carries water from the canal to Darbar Sahib. It is called Hansli. The drain is covered, but there is a pit connected with it which is about four feet square. When I tried to take water from the pit, I saw many dead bodies floating in it. Some living men had also hidden themselves in it and they asked me, “Are they (soldiers) gone?” When I told them they had gone, they came out of it and ran away. . . There were about 800 or 1000 wounded or dead lying near the walls of the Bagh, besides others who ran away wounded and died either in their own houses or in the surrounding lanes. I remained there from fifteen to twenty minutes but could not find my son. I heard the wailing of those shot and who were crying for water. Then I ran back home and heard that my son was safe. I asked three-four men to accompany me to the Jallianwala Bagh and gave water to some of the wounded.’53

  A bookseller from the area, Partap Singh, said, ‘I did not hear any proclamation on the 13th forbidding people to attend public meetings nor did I hear that any such proclamation had been made in the bazaar.’54

  The final tally would be closer to one thousand dead and hundreds more wounded (the official figures were much lower). Not all died on the spot. Many died slowly from bullet wounds and others died at home over a period of time.

  The victims received no help from the authorities. Some assistance from the neighbourhood might have been available between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m., but as orders had already been given in the morning by General Dyer, no one could stir outdoors after 8 p.m. It was difficult for women to remove the injured and dead by themselves. Some just sat by their husbands and sons and fathers, watching them die. Many of the wounded were left to cry in pain the whole night—several simply bled to death.

  Among the dead was Rup Lal Puri’s 18-year-old son, a student at the Hindu Sabha High School. He had been shot thrice.

  Lala Girdhari Lal, who had returned to Amritsar just a day earlier, was in his home overlooking the Bagh that evening. He remembered: