Easter Monday 2009: a fateful anniversary
This Easter Monday (April 13th) is the anniversary of one of the watershed moments in the history of the British Empire.
It was on that date 90 years ago that British troops under the command of Brigadier Reginald Dyer opened fire on a crowd gathered in the centre of Amritsar in the Punjab and slaughtered several hundred people. The exact figure is disputed, but even conservative British estimates put the figure at over 300 dead and around a thousand injured.
There are interesting parallels to be drawn between that incident and the situation in Ireland at the same time.
Both India and Ireland had been agitating for Home Rule. Both had bitter folk memories of mistreatment at the hands of the empire. The famine was still in the living memory of some in Ireland. The Indian Mutiny and the savage British reaction to it had only occured 60 years perviously in India.
In both countries, there had been general support for the British Empire in the First World War. Despite agitating for Home Rule, many in India had supported the war and thousands of Indians had served in the British Army, most of them in a particularly bitter campaign in what was then called Mesopotamia.
In Ireland, the Nationalist leaders had urged Irishmen to enlist in the Army and many thousands had done so. They had high hopes that their sacrifice would be rewarded by a sympathetic response to their reasonable demands for Home Rule.
During the war, there had been not unnaturally some contact between some more militant nationalists in both India
and Ireland with the German empire, followed later, in the case of India at least, by contact with the new Bolshevik government in Russia. A common alliance with "our gallant allies in Europe"perhaps)
In both cases, the British preferred to see these developments as evidence of a worldwide conspiracy (an "axis of evil" perhaps?) against the benign rule of the British Empire. In 1918 it had sent a Judge called Rowlatt to India to investigate the situation there. His response was to beef up anti-dissident legislation which gave the authorities remarkable powers of coercion against any daring to challenge their authority.
In India, the end of the war saw an upsurge of agitation for Home Rule. One of the places where nationalist sentiment was strongly expressed was the Punjab state in northern India. Punjab in general, and the city of Amritsar in particular was and is the centre of the Sikh population. This is a religion separate from the Muslim and Hindu religions which account for most of the Indian population. The Sikhs also have a long history of military service in
both the British and Indian armies in which they were disproportionately represented. Many Punjabis had fought for the British, now they were demanding their own independence, or more accurately a greater say in the running of their own country.
Putting repressive legislation such as the Rowlatt Acts on to the statute books is only part of the story; how it is put into effect depends largely on the willingness and determination of those officials and agents on the ground to enforce such regulations.
In Amritsar in early 1919, those in power were a particularly hard-headed bunch determined not to allow upstart natives to damage the integrity or prestige of the British Empire. The Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab was an Irishman, the Tipperary born Sir Michael Francis O'Dwyer who had an impeccable Catholic education at a school which later amalgamated with the renowned Clongowes Wood college.
O'Dwyer's military commander was a ruthless thug named Reginald Dyer who would brook no tolerance of dissent. Together these two men contributed much to the situation which brought the disaster about.
The immediate situation was caused by the arrest of two Indian nationalist leaders who had come to speak in Amritsar. A crowd gathered to protet on April 10 and to demand their release. They were fired upon and several people killed. Riots broke out in the city resulting in the destruction of some European property and the deaths of several white people, including a woman dragged off her bicycle and stabbed to death.
Dyer responded brutally to these outrages, imposing martial law and subjugating the population to all manner of restrictions to let them know who was boss. No Indian, not even residents, were allowed to walk along the street on which the woman cyclist had been killed; they had to crawl on all fours. All Indians had to "salaam" British officers, in effect salute them as they would their commanders. Failure to do so would result in arrest. (These last two tidbits come not from Indian propaganda but from the official British government report into the ensuing massacre)
By 13 April, martial law including a ban on all public meetings was in force. Despite this, several thousand Sikhs had gathered in Amritsar for a religious festival, many of them coming from outlying towns and villages. Given the scanty communications of the time, many would not have been aware that a ban on gatherings and meetings was in force. Those that did probably thought. "What the hell. What are they going to do about it anyway? It's not as if we are going to start a violent uprising?"
Whatever their true sentiments, they were not going to be given an option either way. As the meeting gathered, in a garden largely enclosed by the surrounding suburbia, Brigadier Dyer moved his troops into place. The narrowness of the streets prevented him from moving in an armoured car equipped with a heavy machine gun. Nevertheless, he had a squad of largely Indian soldiers armed with rifles and plentiful ammunition. Armed with his martial law ban against gatherings of more than four or five people he opened up without warning. The ensuing carnage has become part of Indian folklore.
The Lieutenant Governor O'Dwyer sent Dyer a cable saying that he "approved Dyer's actions". A British government inquiry would later censure Dyer's actions as "un-British" but a subsequent newspaper campaign and public collection would elevate him to the status of hero and demand that his actions were necessary, Just and in the interest of civilisation as we knew it.
What lessons are there for today:
1) The big powers in the world, whatever their protestations about freedom, civilisation and equal treatment for all are ruthless in the exercise of their power. Anybody who dissents from the status quo that favours them is a terrorist, barbarian or medieval potentate that must be put down regardless of the cost.
2) Debts of honour are paid from the purse of self interest. It didn't matter how many nationalist Irish volunteers were slaughtered at Gallipoli or how many Sikh nationalists were killed or died of thirst or malnutrition in Iraq. The interests of the Empire were paramount and if these bloody natives thought that their service was anything but its own reward then they were so sadly deluded that they deserved nothing more than the bayonet.
3) Arguments about democracy for all, civil rights, reasonable entitlements and gratitude for past favours are to be relegated to secondary status to that of the interests of the major powers. No doubt there were many in Britain, and France and America who might have thought "If it weren't for us, you bloody Indians would all be speaking German now!"
4) If you accept the trite pro-Empire arguments of a previous generation, you will be called upon to believe the updated contemporary version. The war against terror today is no different to the Great War for Civilisation (go on,
check the campaign medals for WWI if you don't believe me) of 1914-1918.
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
REMEMBER AMRITSAR!!!
