Gandhi & Churchill (44 page)

Dyer was not a racist of the stereotyped Indian Briton mold. He knew Punjabis well. He had commanded a regiment of them, and they had been devoted to him. At Dyer’s funeral a Gurkha sergeant who had been with him that day said, “General Dyer was a first-class soldier condemned by people at home who know nothing about India.”
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But Dyer’s father and mother had both lived through the Mutiny. He had heard the terrible stories of murders and mob violence. Four Europeans had been killed in Amritsar, and a white woman had been pulled from her bicycle and nearly beaten to death. Memories of Cawnpore and its ghastly well quickened his stride.

As Dyer and his troops arrived at the edge of the Jallianwala Bagh, the densly packed crowd panicked and started running in all directions, some toward his soldiers. At that moment it must have seemed as if 1857 were happening all over again and that Dyer was staring into the abyss.

Dyer barked the order to open fire. One of his men said afterward that “the whole crowd seemed to sink to the ground in a flutter of white garments,” as the Gurkhas and Baluchis blazed away.
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Men, women, and children screamed and scrambled to get away. But they had nowhere to go. The tiny streets leading out became clogged bottlenecks. Almost ten thousand people were trapped in a space, Winston Churchill later pointed out, smaller than Trafalgar Square—while volley after volley rang out.

For ten minutes
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Dyer encouraged his soldiers to keep shooting, until bodies carpeted the ground. Then he gave the order to cease fire. With military precision he and his men shouldered arms and marched out of the Jallianwala Bagh.

They left behind at least 379 dead and four times that number wounded. Cries of pain and moans rose to the rooftops. Bodies lined the entire wall around the enclosure. In some places, eyewitnesses said, they were ten feet deep. Then for good measure, Dyer ordered every Indian who passed the spot where the woman had been pulled from her bicycle to be forced to crawl on all fours—just as Colonel Neill had done at Cawnpore fifty-six years earlier. He set up a whipping post where any native who refused to crawl would be flogged. He and Governor O’Dwyer then imposed a reign of martial law as harsh as anything since the Mutiny.

The clampdown was so intense that it took several weeks for the news from Amritsar to reach the rest of India. Gandhi did not hear of the massacre until June.
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At first he could not believe it. Then his first reaction was to blame not the British but the Indians: “I underrated the power of hatred and ill-will.”
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He assumed there must have been some provocation. Massacres like this were precisely the sort of thing the Raj did
not
do. He decided to suspend his satyagraha campaign in hopes that that would defuse the situation. “Both sides had gone mad” was all he could say at first.

Gandhi’s incredulity made him slow to react. When he did, again his instinct was to blame his own followers rather than the British.
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To the vast majority of others, however, the Jallianwala Bagh and the “crawling order” confirmed the worst view of the most extreme radicals: that British rule in India rested on nothing more than race hatred and brutal force.

Gandhi’s English friend and clergyman Charlie Andrews said, “English honor has departed.” Annie Besant compared the shootings to German war crimes in Belgium. Jinnah called it “physical butchery.” Even the Moderate loyalist Srinivasa Sastri called the massacre, and the floggings and arrests that followed, “barbarous.”
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The Congress issued a statement condemning the incident, with understandable exaggeration, as “an act without parallel in modern times.” Angry mass meetings took place around the country. The poet Rabindranath Tagore resigned his knighthood in protest.

Nirad Chaudhuri was a young student in Calcutta when the news of what was happening in the Punjab began to trickle out. “It became a torture for us to think of Amritsar,” he wrote later. Not just the shootings but the vicious retribution and the arrests of Indians accused of fomenting the riots, while Dyer and his subordinates went free, preyed on every Bengali’s mind. One evening at dinner “a young man suddenly recalled that the Punjab leaders were to receive their sentence that day.” (Two were in fact executed.) Chaudhuri remembered, “All of us started as if we had been touched by a red-hot iron.”
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For millions of educated Indians, the Amritsar massacre left a scar that would never heal. The pain united Indians as never before—or after. All around them the British, supposedly their protectors, not only refused to condemn the atrocities but publicly applauded them. Indians seethed as English newspapers cheered Dyer for averting a “second Mutiny” and the shootings as “one more case of a brave man doing his duty.” They seethed at the sight of English ladies standing outside men’s clubs and hotel doors with collection tins to raise money to give General Dyer a sword of honor.
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They seethed when the government passed an Indemnity Bill, protecting all officials connected with the shootings or the “crawling order” from lawsuits. (The viceroy did order a halt of the crawling order as soon as he learned of it.)

Then the government offered relatives of the four Europeans murdered in Amritsar 400,000 rupees in compensation, while the relatives of those killed in the Jallianwala Bagh received only 500 rupees per body.
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Indians were aghast. More than any other event, Amritsar and its aftermath solidified national support for Indian independence. It did so months before Gandhi became involved.

He, like the others, protested against the arrests and trials under martial law. But while even loyalists like Sastri were outspoken in their criticism of the government’s inaction against Dyer, Gandhi refused to be drawn out, citing insufficient evidence. In fact, his approach was precisely the same as it had been in Champaran. What was needed, he said on May 28, was a government commission to investigate the events in the Punjab. He offered to launch another satyagraha if the government did nothing. Meanwhile the Congress decided to launch an investigation of its own, which excluded Gandhi altogether.
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Then the Raj’s bureaucratic wheels slowly began to turn. Secretary of State Edwin Montagu convinced New Delhi it had to do something, if only to head the Congress off at the pass. In September the viceroy announced to the Legislative Council that a committee would be set up to investigate the shootings, headed by Judge Lord Hunter, former solicitor general for Scotland. Indians were skeptical, but Gandhi applauded the inquiry, urging all Indians to cooperate with it and trust to British justice. He cited Champaran as an example of how the Raj could listen and learn. He refused to condemn the Indemnity Bill passed that same session, to the disgust even of his supporters.
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But in the early autumn of 1919, as the Hunter Commission began its work, Gandhi’s view changed. The commission was swallowing whole Dyer and O’Dwyer’s account of a Punjab on the verge of rebellion and their view that the shooting had thwarted a second Mutiny. Like Dyer’s military superiors in New Delhi, the commissioners were inclined to believe the “officer on the spot,” especially a white one. The commission also refused to meet the Congress’s conditions for cooperation, such as releasing activists who had been jailed under O’Dwyer’s martial law reign.

In the meantime the Congress’s own investigation had become a hopeless muddle. At its head was Motilal Nehru, a distinguished figure in Moderate Congress ranks. He had arrived in Amritsar in June. The scene and smell of death in the Jallianwala Bagh, he told his son Jawaharlal, a young lawyer in Delhi, was “truly gruesome.” The scene was like a a strange mirror image of the Bibighar a half-century before. There was even a well in the square, which numerous witnesses said was still filled with dead bodies.
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Motilal Nehru, like the rest of the Congress, wanted justice. But very soon he and his fellow committee members were swamped with testimony from some nineteen hundred eyewitnesses, with no clear way to sift through it, let alone a method for producing a report. Everything ground to a halt, as recriminations within the committee began. Finally in October they turned in desperation to the only man who could sort it all out.

Mohandas Gandhi eagerly stepped forward with his usual energy and organizing skill. In a couple of months he turned the tangle of evidence—recorded “in the crudest English,” recalled investigator M. R. Jayakar, with “bad typing, incorrect and illegible spelling, misspelt names”—into a carefully crafted piece of lawyerly analysis. The facts, Gandhi the London-trained barrister said, had to fit “like bricks…making a roadway for you to walk to your goal.”
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The evidence was harrowing. Eyewitnesses who had watched the Jallianwala Bagh killings from the rooftops had seen “blood pouring in profusion…even those who were lying down were shot…Some had their heads cut open, others had eyes shot and nose, chest, arms or legs shattered.” Some witnesses had sat all night in the Bagh with dying husbands and brothers. Others remembered the bodies of those who had been shot, but managed to escape, being left in the street for dead—including the bodies of small children.
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Still other witnesses described being forced at bayonet point to crawl on their bellies past the point where the white woman had been beaten, then being kicked and beaten by their English tormentors. At one point an entire wedding party had been flogged for failing to follow the crawling order.

All the evidence, all the testimony, all the citation of past law and precedent was pulled together in nearly two hundred tightly argued pages. They led inexorably to Gandhi’s conclusion, published in late March 1920, that the events in Punjab were “a calculated piece of inhumanity towards utterly innocent and unarmed men, including children, and unparalleled for its ferocity in the history of modern British administration.” He blamed the viceroy for not investigating the events in Punjab himself, for “clothing the officials with indemnity with indecent haste” (Gandhi had reversed his earlier view), and for the “criminal want of imagination” in allowing the death sentences passed under martial law to stand.
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When the Congress report was released on March 25, 1920, all India held its breath to see whether the official Hunter Commission would concur. Its own report appeared on May 3. Its tone was very different, although it agreed on many points of fact. The commissioners stated that Dyer had committed “a grave error” in ordering the shootings at Jallianwala Bagh and that his crawling order was “injudicious.” But the commission concluded that martial law was fully justified and even blamed “Mr. Gandhi’s movement” for undermining the rule of law in the Punjab and elsewhere. Members saw no reason for the government to do anything more than it already had, let alone punish Dyer or O’Dwyer.
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The viceroy accepted the Hunter Commission’s report, and General Dyer was relieved of command. But across India the reaction was outrage. Gandhi in particular was disappointed. The commission’s biggest erstwhile fan blasted the report as “an attempt to condone official lawlessness” and “page after page of thinly disguised official whitewash.”
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Gandhi had come to another life passage, a moment when the course of events and his place in them had to change. His work with the victims of Amritsar convinced him he had to end what he called his “splendid isolation” and enter the arena of mainstream Indian politics.

In retrospect, this decision seems surprising. The work in Champaran, Kaira, and Ahmedabad, and the Rowlatt satyagraha—weren’t they already part of politics? In Gandhi’s mind, they were not. He saw himself, and his soul force satyagrahi, as elite shock troops to be mobilized only to correct “a manifest and cruel wrong.” Gandhi never meant to use them to pursue the aims of the nationalists, let alone to build a conventional political base.

But in the aftermath of Amritsar, he was poised to strike. Authoring the Congress report moved him to the front rank of Indian politicians, even as he was reconsidering his own loyalty to the British Empire. Like an estranged lover, he felt betrayed by the Hunter report. “I can no longer retain affection,” he wrote, “for a Government so evilly-manned as it is nowadays.”
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In April he was asked to replace Annie Besant as president of the All-India Home Rule League. He had already taken editorial control of her newspaper,
Young India,
the previous May. The next month he took a prominent place at the All-India Congress Committee meeting in Benares, which rejected the Hunter report as “tainted by racial bias” and called on the British Parliament to take legal action against Dyer.

“A scandal of this magnitude cannot be tolerated by the [Indian] nation,” Gandhi wrote, “if it is to preserve its self-respect and become a full partner in the Empire.” Still, even at the end of May 1919, when things seemed so bleak, Gandhi was warning readers of his Navajivan newspaper not to turn their backs on the British government as faithless or to assume that “all the officers in India are autocratic.” He still held great love and affection for the British people, he wrote. “They are a brave, un-suspecting and fairly Godfearing people…I believe that no other people, excepting Indians, recognize soul force as quickly as the British do.”
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But how could the British restore their credibility and honor in India, not only with Gandhi but with its politically active educated elite? That responsibility rested on one man, Dyer’s ultimate boss, the secretary of state for war. In June 1920 that man happened to be Winston Churchill.