Remembering martyrs of Jallianwala Bagh Massacre


Jallianwala Bagh  massacre, the bloodiest in Indian history took place on this day, i.e. 13 April. It was considered as a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India.  On the day of Baishakhi  thousands of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh  near the Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar.

The people responsible for this were  Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer and British Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab Michael O’Dwyer .

An hour after the meeting began as scheduled at 4:30 pm, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched a group of sixty-five Gurkha and twenty-five Baluchi soldiers into the Bagh, fifty of whom were armed with rifles.

He ordered them to shoot at the crowd which included men, women, and children. Dyer kept the firing up for about ten minutes.

Dyer had also brought two armoured cars armed with machine guns, however the vehicles were left outside as they were unable to enter the Bagh through the narrow entrance.

The Jallianwala Bagh was bounded on all sides by houses and buildings and had few narrow entrances, most of which were kept permanently locked. The main entrance was relatively wider, but was guarded by the troops backed by the armoured vehicles. General Dyer did not order the crowd to disperse; indeed he blocked the main exits.

His goal, he explained later, was not to disperse the meeting but to punish the Indians for disobedience. General Dyer ordered his troops to begin shooting towards the densest sections of the crowd, including the women and children. He continued the shooting, approximately 1,650 rounds in all, until the ammunition supply was almost exhausted. The crowd made no effort to attack the soldiers in any way.

A number of people died in stampedes at the narrow gates or by jumping into the solitary well on the compound to escape the shooting. A plaque in the monument at the site, set up after independence, says that 120 bodies were pulled out of the well. The wounded could not be moved from where they had fallen, as a curfew had been declared – many more died during the night.

Official Government sources estimated the fatalities at 379, with 1,100 wounded. Actual, casualty numbers  were more than 1,500, with approximately 1,000 killed.

The news remained shielded for more than a month  and it was only in June that people across India came to know about it.  Rabindranath Tagore renounced  his knighthood conferred upon him by  British Government as a mark of protest.

Dyer was sacked from his post, but back in Britain  he became an overnight hero. No charges were framed against him or any disciplinary action was taken thereof. The Hunter Commission   which was constituted to probe the massacre found him only guilty of a mistaken notion of duty.

 

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