India: A History. Revised and Updated (87 page)

Ghadr
, or ‘Mutiny’, was indeed the title of a weekly newspaper which had been circulating widely amongst expatriate Indians in the Far East and North America. Lest any doubt remain about its politics, its subtitle boldly declared it the ‘Enemy of the British Government’. A party of the same name, founded in the USA but now operating from British Columbia, was responsible for the paper’s publication, and it was one of the party’s Singapore adherents who had chartered the Japanese steamer. With the outbreak of war other ships from North America and east Asia brought back to India more returning migrants of ‘Ghadrite’ sympathies. Committed to the violent overthrow of British rule, the Ghadrites had identified the war as a golden opportunity to foment rebellion. Already a German cruiser, the
Emden
, was loose in the Indian Ocean and playing havoc with British shipping. In September 1914, tearing a leaf from the annals of the French
Compagnie des Indes
, it even shelled Madras. For a minute it looked as if the world war might engulf India itself.

But the
Emden
’s bombardment would not be repeated, and the Ghadrites soon found that they had badly miscalculated. Many never reached the Panjab; others were betrayed by their own disorganisation or by the pro-British loyalties of most Panjabis. Additionally the war had strengthened the British capacity to deal with them thanks to the newly-imposed Defence of India Act. A few murders and robberies were carried out, but a planned uprising was foiled and by 1916 most of the perhaps five thousand
Ghadrite activists had been rounded up. Of those who stood trial in the Panjab, forty-six were hanged and two hundred transported or jailed. The only actual mutiny was that staged by sympathisers, both Muslim and Sikh, amongst Indian troops in Singapore in early 1915; after courts-martial, thirty-seven of the Singapore mutineers faced a firing squad. According to one of the finest of India’s twentieth-century historians, ‘these lowly Ghadr peasant and sepoy heroes have been much less remembered than the
bhadralok
[gentleman] Bengal terrorists – yet surely they deserve a better fate.’
²¹
The British would certainly remember them. Insurrection was a far more serious affair in the recruiting grounds of the Panjab than in Bengal. With consequences which, come 1919, Gandhi would rightly call ‘diabolical’, the Panjab would now be policed with exceptional vigilance and rigour.

While Gandhi stalked the
mofussil
and evaded institutional politics, while Ghadrites blundered into police traps, and while Indian troops tasted the horror of the trenches and the appalling mismanagement of the Mesopotamian campaign, government and politicians continued their centre-stage recitative of agonised complaint and trumpeted concession. To encourage wartime support, to compensate for its economic hardships, and to allay the dangers of a necessarily reduced British military presence, the government let it be known that a new package of reforms was under consideration. This was in 1915. In 1916 the new viceroy Lord Chelmsford and the Liberal secretary of state Edwin Montagu began active discussions. In 1917 they issued a public statement of intent. In 1918 they toured India collecting representations from every conceivable interest group. In 1919 they finally announced the Montagu–Chelmsford (or ‘Montford’) reforms. And in 1921 the reforms finally came into effect. ‘The motto I would ask you to place before yourselves is
Festina lente
,’ said Chelmsford.

‘Hastening slowly’ themselves, Congress ‘moderates’ had kept up their genteel demands for greater representation and equal access to the civil service while outlawing tactics which under wartime restrictions might be construed as seditious. This left the field clear for Bal Tilak, who returned from his Burma exile in 1914, and for another ageing but formidable campaigner in the person of Mrs Annie Besant. A professional patron of radical causes, Besant’s Theosophical interests had brought her to Madras in 1907 where her Irish parentage, Fabian principles and bustling energy converted her to active championship of Indian home-rule. In 1916 both she and Tilak founded Home Rule Leagues outside the control of Congress and campaigned energetically for them.

Tilak concentrated on his old stamping grounds in the Deccan. There he adopted, as well as the national campaign, a local home-rule agenda
which included the promotion of the Deccan’s regional languages – Marathi, Kannada and Telugu – as media of education and as criteria for the creation of distinct language-based states (the future Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh). Other leaders, Muslim as well as Hindu, invariably espoused similarly non-national issues which were dear to particular religious communities, castes, language groups, economic interests or labour organisations. Politicisation, while heightening national awareness, was also heightening sectional competition. In fact the frantic behind-the-scenes activity at the 1916 Lucknow Congress brings to mind post-independence politics with its mass of ‘parties’ engaged in fickle alliances for the advancement of particular interests. Not only did Congress and the Muslim League agree a joint programme at Lucknow but, with the deaths of the moderate Gokhale and Ferozeshah Mehta in 1915, both Tilak and Besant negotiated their way back into the Congress fold.

It did not mean that they eschewed ‘extremism’. Six months later Besant’s rhetoric became so outspoken that she was arrested. Howls of protest from the whole spectrum of nationalist opinion greeted this affront. Even Gandhi, who had no liking for either Besant or her Westernised methods, threatened a
satyagraha.
But Montagu and Chelmsford remained in conciliatory mood. In what amounted to a milestone in British policy they declared the goal of their proposed reform package to be ‘the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire’.

This constitutional mouthful, once its jaw-breaking roughage about ‘gradual’ development and ‘progressive’ realisation had been spat out, tasted much like home-rule. Moreover, as Congress gulped, Montagu and Chelmsford made a sincere effort to secure the widest possible co-operation in the consultation process which was to precede the final package. Annie Besant was therefore released after just three months’ detention and in December 1917 was elected president of Congress. The consultations went on throughout 1918. Meanwhile the war ended and, to replace the wartime Defence of India Act which had proved so effective against the Ghadrites, the government opted for preventative powers of summary trial and detention. Embodied in the Rowlatt Bills, this package of ‘no charge, no trial, no appeal’ proved decidedly unpalatable. It belied the spirit of the imminent reforms, it insulted a people who had lately made such heavy sacrifices for the empire, and it foreshadowed British readiness to resort to further repression. Even those Indians who now sat on the viceroy’s council unanimously rejected the bills. The Home Rule Leagues of Besant and Tilak
mobilised for defiance. More significantly they deferred to Gandhi, who now forsook his lofty detachment to declare the first national
satyagraha.
Though many nationalists had gulped down the ‘Montford’ promise, all gagged on the Rowlatt repression.

A nationwide
hartal
(‘lock-out’) scheduled for 6 April 1919 had mixed results. Delhi got the date wrong and shut down on 30 March; there were violent protests and some shooting. Bombay was brought to a complete standstill on schedule; most other cities witnessed some disruption; and Gandhi, while travelling north to supervise
satyagraha
in Delhi and the Panjab, was removed from the train and informed of his confinement to the Bombay presidency. This ‘arrest’ sparked more protests, especially in Bombay and Gujarat. But it was in the Panjab, still mindful of the Ghadrites and heavily policed under an uncompromising lieutenant-governor called Sir Michael O’Dwyer, that tragedy struck.

Although most Panjabis had little understanding of
satyagraha –
some were reportedly unsure whether Gandhi was ‘a person or a thing’
²²
– his call was respected even in the Sikhs’ holy city of Amritsar. There, on 10 April, two of those who had addressed the 6 April protest were arrested for incitement. This brought their supporters out onto the streets on the eleventh. They were stopped, fired on by troops, and then took revenge in an orgy of arson and violence which left five Europeans dead. According to an admirably dispassionate assessment, ‘it is difficult, given the clear difference in Panjab methods [of dealing with protesters] and the unmistakable evidence about crowd reactions, not to conclude that the violence was largely due to government action.’
²³
In the same uncompromising spirit and without apparently attempting any form of consultation, O’Dwyer also sent for more troops. They arrived next day under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer who, for pig-headedness as well as a nearly identical surname, is easily confused with the governor. Dyer stationed pickets throughout the city of Amritsar and issued orders prohibiting all meetings and demonstrations.

On the thirteenth, a Sunday, word came of an assembly at the Jallianwala Bagh, an open space hemmed in by houses. It was also the feast-day of
Baisakhi
, and many of the several thousand in the Bagh are thought to have been villagers from outside Amritsar who had come into the city to celebrate this popular spring festival. Dyer probably knew nothing of this. Arrived at the Bagh, he was disappointed to find that there was no access for his armoured car. He left it outside, marched in with a mixed force of Indian and Gurkha troops, and immediately ordered them to fire into the crowd. He gave the order to cease firing only when their ammunition was nearly exhausted. Then he withdrew.

The crowd had offered no threat, Dyer had given no warning; communication was by bullet alone. Because Dyer’s men were occupying the main exit, the crowd obligingly formed a dense scrum round the only other way out. It was impossible for the troops to miss; nor did they. After the firing stopped, they shouldered arms and turned about. The wounded were left untended, the dead uncounted. Dyer simply drove away, mission completed.

The official inquiry would later conclude that 1650 rounds had been fired inside the Jallianwala Bagh, that over 1200 men, women and children had been seriously wounded, and that 379 had died (an equally reliable but unofficial source gave the latter figure as 530). There were other casualties, too. On an April afternoon in Amritsar, in a few minutes of vindictive folly, the moral pretence for British rule had been riddled into transparency, and all hope of peaceful post-war collaboration blown away in the maelstrom of killing.

There was no excuse for it. The massacre had occurred before the imposition of martial rule; even if it had occurred afterwards, Dyer’s conduct would have been indefensible under any military code. To make matters worse, when later questioned, Dyer seemed if anything proud of his action. His intention, he said, had been to exact revenge for the previous killings and to make an example which would deter further defiance anywhere in the Panjab. To this end he had also had prisoners beaten, sometimes in public, and had made Indians crawl the street where an English missionary lady had been attacked. Nor was he alone. Equally provocative methods were employed in Lahore, where there had also been arson attacks. At Gujranwala, when the situation appeared to be getting out of control, Governor O’Dwyer had simply ordered up aircraft and had the city bombed.

Dyer came from a British family long-resident in India. They ran a brewery near Simla and there the general had perhaps imbibed the racial fears which had haunted his countrymen ever since 1857. Certainly he knew his history. His punishments reeked of the Kanpur reprisals, and his behaviour looks to have been conditioned by 1857 ideas of ‘saving the Panjab’ when, as now, Delhi was already wracked by disturbances. Moreover it soon became apparent that many other British people felt the same way. Although relieved of his command, Dyer was never formally punished. To have done so, it was argued, would have provoked a white backlash like that which had greeted the Ilbert Bill. On the contrary, in England he was rewarded. As the ‘Saviour of the Panjab’, a
Morning Post
subscription was raised on his behalf; it realised £26,000. Designated ‘Defender of the Empire’ he was also presented with a gilt sword.

This lionising of Dyer was as offensive to Indian opinion as was the
repressive conduct of the Panjab authorities. Details of the Amritsar massacre emerged only slowly as government and Congress inquiries got underway. The gasps of Indian horror thus coincided with the grunts of Indo-British approval. For many hitherto ‘moderate’ nationalists it was the turning point. Tagore, for instance, renounced his knighthood. The December 1919 Congress was switched to Amritsar to highlight the sense of betrayal; and it was presided over by Motilal Nehru, an immensely successful Allahabad lawyer who had previously been denied permission to enter the Panjab in order to defend one of the Amritsar protesters.

Up till now no family could have been more staunchly pro-British than Motilal’s. Such was his admiration for British ideals of legality and humanity, and such his expectations of British–Indian collaboration, that he had sent Jawaharlal, his only son, to school at Harrow and university at Cambridge. On Jawaharlal’s return he had censured his radical outbursts. Now he began to endorse them. The British were no longer worthy of respect. Anand Bhawan, the Nehrus’ palatial residence in Allahabad, was stripped of its European furniture. Motilal abandoned his Savile Row suits and took to wearing the homespun cottons recommended by Gandhi. A great bonfire of the dresses, ties, boas and homburgs discarded by the Nehru clan would be the earliest memory of granddaughter Indira, born in 1917. Although still opposed to any action outside the law, Motilal would join the imminent non-co-operation movement and make the considerable sacrifice involved in withdrawing from legal practice.