The pleasant park in Amritsar today is at odds with the ‘monstrous’ events, as Churchill named them, of 13th April 1919. Amritsar, just inside the border with Pakistan near Lahore, is best known today for the Golden Temple and its magnificent citadel.
Part 1 of 2
HOWEVER we may dwell upon the difficulties of General Dyer during the Amritsar riots, upon the anxious and critical situation in the Punjab, upon the danger to Europeans throughout that province, upon the long delays which have taken place in reaching a decision about this officer, upon the procedure that was at this point or at that point adopted, however we may dwell upon all this, one tremendous fact stands out — I mean the slaughter of nearly 400 persons and the wounding of probably three or four times as many, at the Jallian Wallah Bagh on 13th April.* That is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.
The death-toll is disputed. The British set it at 379, the Indian National Congress at about 1,000. It might have been much worse. Providentially, narrow streets had kept out Dyer’s armoured vehicles and machine-guns.
Précis
In 1920, a year after General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on an unarmed crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar in the Punjab, Secretary for War Winston Churchill rose in the Commons to denounce the entire episode. He labelled it monstrous, and dismissed out of hand all attempts to excuse or diminish the horror of it. (59 / 60 words)
Part Two
The colonnaded “Martyrs’ Well” and the bullet-holes in the walls of neighbouring buildings are a constant reminder of the inexcusable events of 1919. In his speech to the Commons, Churchill stressed that the action taken by General Dyer was not simply a disproportionate response to rumours of Communist agitation: it was a glimpse of an emerging policy of government by terror, the very thing which made Communism itself so repugnant and so irreconcilable with British and indeed civilised values.
There is surely one general prohibition which we can make. I mean a prohibition against what is called "frightfulness." What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.
I yield to no one in my detestation of Bolshevism, and of the revolutionary violence which precedes it.* But my hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality.* It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practise in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained. Governments who have seized upon power by violence and by usurpation have often resorted to terrorism in their desperate efforts to keep what they have stolen, but the august and venerable structure of the British Empire, where lawful authority descends from hand to hand and generation after generation, does not need such aid. Such ideas are absolutely foreign to the British way of doing things.
Intelligence reports that German and Russian agents were abroad in the Punjab, and the possibility that they might try to use the festival to spark ‘revolutionary violence’ were cited as General Dyer’s justification for taking action against the crowd. Another factor was said to be that just two days earlier, Marcella Sherwood, a teacher, had been assaulted, stripped, and dumped in a back-street. But as Churchill was at pains to remind us, neither of these could possibly justify what subsequently happened, not simply because they were not bad enough, but because terrorism is never justifiable, whatever fears, doubts or resentments may be upon us.
As Churchill would say in the House on 22nd October, 1945, “the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries”. No politics can make all men equally prosperous, healthy, talented or happy. Of course, all human lives are of equal value however unproductive, feeble or hopeless they may seem to be; yet that is one equality that Communism, Fascism and Socialism all utterly disregard.
Précis
Churchill did not hesitate to describe the action as an act of terrorism. Some had justified it on the grounds that Communist agitators may have been among the crowd; yet it was government by terror, said Churchill, that made Communism itself so repugnant, and such a policy must play no part in British politics. (54 / 60 words)
