Dimdima
Online Children's Magazine from India
Jallianwala — The Aftermath |
Following
the public outcry against the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh the government was
compelled to appoint a committee of enquiry with Sir John Hunter as the
chairman. The Congress appointed its own committee with Motilal Nehru as
chairman and Gandhiji as one of the members. The reports of these two
committees make chilling reading. |
In Gujranwala, the birthplace of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Col. O'Brien ordered the
bombing of a residential area because people from the locality had come out into
the streets to protest against the Jallianwala massacre. However, when the
bombing took place, the crowd had long since dispersed.
At one village where bombs were dropped supposedly because of a meeting going on
there, a captain of the army ordered his men to fire at the fleeing villagers.
While questioning the captain, a member of the Hunter Committee said to him:
"Your objective of dispersing the crowd was achieved when you dropped bombs on
the village. Why did you have to shoot at the people running away?
"To do more damage," was the brazen reply.
In Lahore, Col. Johnson ordered students of D A V College, the Dyal Singh
College and the Medical College to report to the police station which was quite
some distance away from the colleges, four times a day — twice in the morning
and twice in the evening.
Sir Chimanlal Setalvad a member of the Hunter Commission said to the Colonel:
"To comply with your orders the students must have had to walk at least 17 miles
each day!"
"Actually it was 16," replied the Colonel, unabashed. "I measured the distance."
"Did it never occur to you that you were making these young men bear bitter
hatred towards the British government the rest of their lives?" asked Sir
Chimanlal.
One man who carried the memory of Jallianwala Bagh the rest of his life was
Udham Singh. Twenty-one years after the incident, in March 1940, Udham Singh
shot dead Sir Michael O'Dwyer who was the Lt. Governor of Punjab at the time of
the massacre.
Udham Singh was hanged on 31 July that same year. Thirty-four years later, in
1974 his ashes were returned to India.
Dimdima is the Sanskrit word for ‘drumbeat’. In olden days, victory in battle was heralded by the beat of drums or any important news to be conveyed to the people used to be accompanied with drumbeats.
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Dimdima.com, the Children's Website of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan launched in 2000 and came out with a Printed version of Dimdima Magazine in 2004. At present the Printed Version have more than 35,000 subscribers from India and Abroad.