The Amritsar Massacre: Shame of an Empire

The Jalianwalla Bagh

A Commission of Inquiry was instigated to get to the facts of the case. It established that General Dyer was fully aware the day before that a rally was due to take place but had done nothing to try to prevent it. When questioned he remained wholly unapolegetic. He didn’t try to disperse the crowd, he said, or issue a warning, because they would merely have laughed and he would have been made to look a fool. When asked why he didn’t tend to the wounded he replied, “Certainly not. It was not my job. The hospitals were open.”

Dyer was congratulated on his actions by the Governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who was assassinated by an Indian nationalist, who had not forgotten Amritsar, in 1940. He was defended in the House of Lords at Westminster and roundly praised by the British press for preventing a second Indian Mutiny. But as the true facts of the events began to seep out public opinion began to change. The House of Commons led by Winston Churchill, who described Amritsar as monstrous and stood in singular, sinister isolation, censured him. In 1920, he was forced to resign his commission and returned to England where he was presented with a cheque for £26,000, the result of a public collection made on his behalf. No further sanction was taken against him. Soon after he suffered a stroke and was to remain incapacitated until his death in 1927.

The massacre at Amritsar undermined fundamentally British legitimacy in India. The campaigns of strikes and non-cooperation instigated by Mahatma Gandhi reached levels of support and popularity previously thought unimaginable and the Indian National Congress became effectively a Government in waiting. It could reasonably be said that the Amritsar Massacre marked the beginning of the end of British Empire in India.