Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [121]
Since the main entrance to the Jallianwala Bagh was too narrow to drive an armoured car through, General Dyer marched in twenty-five Gurkha and twenty-five Indian soldiers armed with rifles, along with another forty Gurkhas armed only with khukuris (the traditional curved steel knives); in addition he had five parties of fifty soldiers each placed outside the city walls. In his account of the event afterwards, Dyer said that he estimated the size of the crowd, which was being addressed by a man on a platform, at ‘about 5000’. He was worried, he said, that unless he acted immediately his smaller force could be overwhelmed. So, without any warning, he gave the order to open fire. There was immediate panic. In the pandemonium some people were picked off as they tried to climb the walls, others as they tried to shelter behind bodies on the ground. Yet more were trampled underfoot. The shooting lasted between ten and fifteen minutes, during which time the soldiers loosed off 1,650 rounds, and it stopped only when Dyer judged that they would soon not have enough ammunition left to protect themselves if they were to be attacked on the way back to barracks. By that time men, women and children lay dead and dying all over the place. (The official casualty estimate later was 379 killed and 1,200 wounded.) Then, without bothering to attend to the wounded, Dyer marched his men out.
As news of the cold-blooded killing in Amritsar spread, the pressure to hold an inquiry became irresistible. A Scottish judge, Lord Hunter, was summoned, and his committee of inquiry, including both Indian and British members, heard evidence from witnesses including General Dyer, and then, predictably, split on racial lines. Dyer’s decisions fitted a pattern – as demonstrated perhaps most graphically by the behaviour of British authorities after the Indian Mutiny, in the Zulu wars and in Sudan – of using devastating force to impose their will. But in the Jallianwala Bagh Dyer had been facing defenceless civilians. In trying to justify his actions afterwards, the general used a particularly telling expression. He had not attempted to clear the Bagh peacefully because ‘then they would all come back and laugh at me, and I considered I would be making myself a fool’. This explanation from an unrepentant imperialist is curiously similar to George Orwell’s later reflection on his unhappy time as an empire policeman that ‘every white man’s life in the East was one long struggle not to be laughed at’. The true reason for the need to ‘give them a lesson’ and to produce ‘a sufficient moral effect’ was not strength but fear.
The Committee produced its conclusions that Dyer had misread an unlawful assembly as a rebellion. The British government seemed shocked and censured the general for ‘acting out of a mistaken concept of duty’; he was denied promotion and then resigned from the army. The Daily Mail claimed that he had been sentenced without trial, the Morning Post ran a campaign which raised £26,000 from the public, while a letter to The Times from Belgravia pointed out that ‘When a handful of whites are faced by hundreds of thousands of fanatical natives, one cannot apply one’s John Stuart Mill.’ There were debates in the House of Commons in which much humbug was spoken by people who might have known better. Herbert Asquith maintained that there had never been anything like it ‘in the whole annals of Anglo-Indian history’. A retired brigadier talked of how the empire rested on prestige and ‘once you destroy that British prestige, then the empire will collapse like a house of cards’. A retired colonel asserted that the Amritsar massacre was the gravest blot on British history ‘since we burned Joan of Arc’. And Winston Churchill – veteran of