Jallianwala Bagh: The massacre that shook the empire

The actual shooting is supposed to have lasted only about 10 minutes. As the famous sequence in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi suggests, when the British officer Gen. Reginald Dyer saw some men trying to flee the park by trying to scale a wall, he ordered his men to aim in that direction, killing more. Gandhi launched the non-cooperation movement with determination and Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood, saying, “Such mass murderers aren’t worthy of giving any title to anyone.” Winston Churchill called Dyer’s act “monstrous” in parliament, and the House of Commons reprimanded Dyer, although the House of Lords did not, and many conservative figures praised him. Perhaps one thing that would unite most Indians today as the country heads towards a contentious election is a demand that modern Britain should account for the wrong—expressing a genuine apology for the massacre would be a good first step, but there are many other wrongs of colonization, including the Bengal famine of 1943. Sometimes, the state becomes complicit, by doing nothing when one group attacks another—think of mobs massacring Bengali Muslims in Nellie in 1983; the pogrom of Sikhs in northern India in 1984 after prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination; and the mass killings of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, after the Godhra incident in which 59 Hindu kar sevaks died.