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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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