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Jallianwala — The Aftermath

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.
Gen. Dyer, appearing before the Hunter Committee, admitted that many people at the meeting in Jallianwala Bagh might not have been aware of the ban on public meetings. Dyer also admitted that he might have been able to disperse the crowd, without firing. He said he fired because if he had dispersed them by other means they would have returned after he had gone and he would have become the butt of ridicule.
Generally, firing is resorted to when repeated warnings to disperse are ignored and even then the objective is to disperse the crowd, not to kill.
Dyer said that his intention in opening fire was not only to disperse the crowd but also to punish the people who had assembled there. So he directed the fire at places where the crowd was the thickest, apparently to 'punish' the maximum number of people. He said he had fired 1650 rounds and stopped only when he ran out of ammunition. He admitted that he had not organised medical aid for the injured. He said it was not his duty to render such help.
After the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh, martial law was declared in the Punjab. The borders were sealed. People were prevented from entering or leaving the state and the press was gagged. For months nobody knew what was happening in the state where the government had let loose a reign of terror. Pedestrians using the narrow street on which Ms Sherwood had been beaten up were forced to crawl on their bellies. No one was spared, not even the very young or the very old or the infirm. For the residents of the area, going out on their work and returning home became an ordeal. To make the local people 'realise' where they stood in relation to the white man, Dyer issued the 'Salaam order,' making it mandatory for Indians to salute passing Europeans.
People were arrested on mere suspicion and flogged mercilessly or were tortured to extract confessions of crimes they had not committed.
Many hotheads in the administration and the army drew inspiration from Gen. Dyer's methods and caused untold misery to the people.


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.

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