Daily Times

In the late spring of 1919, green meadows in the fertile plains of the Punjab were acquiring a golden hue with the sun’s rising radiance. It was the onset of harvest time. A century ago the near-absence of pollution, the air would have been fresh. With mustard yellow pastures in the periphery of the ripening wheat crops and the spring breeze imbued with fragrance of fresh foliage, gave spring its serene and alluring splendour.

For centuries, this was a season of joy and festivity for the tillers who would toil all year around and waited for this season when livelihood from their labour would materialise. It was celebration time. Men, women and children attired in bright dresses were in festive mood. Revellers danced and drank the special local brews, with drums beating and singings lyrics of love and gratification. This festival, called Baisakhi, aimed at rejoicing and anticipating plenteous harvests had been celebrated since times immemorial. In 1919, Punjab’s main Baisakhi was to be held at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar on April 13. However, this year the jubilations were not to be. The merriments of the 1919 Baisakhi were drenched in innocent blood in one of the most atrocious massacres by the British imperialists in colonial India.

At the time, India and the Punjab in particular were feverish with political ferment. Spring had brought exhilarating winds of a hope for change from near and afar. Above all, the victorious Russian Revolution in 1917 instilled rousing audacity in the regions youth. The rebellious Ghadar Party and its heroic struggle had inspired courage and daring on a new generation in their struggle against the Raj. Indian soldiers returning from the First World War had brought home first hand news and information of the revolutions that were sweeping across Europe and elsewhere. At the end of war, the prices of rice, wheat, salt and other basic needs had skyrocketed. Likewise, the mass fury against the detentions of political activists was rising. All these factors were adding to the seething resentment amongst the populace.

The wily strategists of the British Imperialism were fully aware of the situation and had started employing more repressive measures to crush any possible uprising. They feared a resurgence of Ghadar-type revolt in Punjab. They were also obsessed by the potential impact of the Russian Revolution on India. As a pre-emptive measure the draconian ‘Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919’ – or the Rowlatt Act – was imposed in March 1919 by the Imperial Legislative Council.

Macaulay also destroyed the educational and vocational system of learning in the subcontinent replacing it with western education and creating a native anglicised elite that would be the crucial buffer and support to perpetuate the British colonial rule

The rebellious overtones in Punjab were palpable weeks before the day of Baisakhi congregation at Jallianwala. On Sunday April 13, the crowds had started to enter the Bagh’s enclave from sunrise. By the afternoon, around 20,000 people had gathered at Jallianwala Bagh. Defiant speeches were delivered against the imperialist atrocities, deportations of revolutionaries, price hike and firing on protestors. There were also large number ordinary villagers who had come to Amritsar for celebrating Baisakhi with all the colours and rituals.

But the colonial authorities assumed another ‘mutiny’ was imminent and began preparations to crush it with brute force. Additional troops and heavy arsenal were ordered into Amritsar. That morning Colonel Reginald Dyer, who was assigned to lead the “operation”, had conducted a march of his troops through the city, announcing that any gathering would be “dispersed by force of arms if necessary”. The ordinary villagers who had come to celebrate Baisakhi at Jallianwala Bagh in droves from villages and towns far and wide didn’t exactly know what these orders actually meant. The troops made no effort to prevent people from assembling at the venue or to prevent activists from beating drums in the streets to mobilise masses for the meeting.

On reaching the venue, Col Dyer left the armoured cars with machine guns outside the Jallianwala enclave because the gate was too narrow for these to pass. The troops took positions. Still a vast majority did not believe they would be fired upon. There was no warning to disperse. The firing began suddenly and ruthlessly. One thousand six hundred and fifty rounds were fired within minutes, at least 379 persons including children were brutally murdered according to the official reports. Other relatively independent sources estimated over 1,000 deaths, with more than 2,000 wounded.

Such was the paranoia of the British officers that the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, Michael O’Dwyer, was ‘informed’ that, “a Russo-German Bolshevik organisation was behind the Rowlatt protests and was planning another hartal (strike) in which the red flag would be heaved up everywhere at the same time.” This further hyped the paranoia of the colonial administrators who gathered a huge force to be marshalled for crushing the uprising.

After committing the slaughter, Col Dyer defended himself: “I consider this is the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral, and widespread effect… it was my duty to produce…It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd; but one of producing a sufficient moral effect…not only on those present but more specially throughout the Punjab… must fire and inflict maximum injuries, because the British force must command fear, in a ‘native’ population.”

Long before this imperialist barbarity, Karl Marx wrote of the British rule in India: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilisation lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked…” Even before Marx main stalwart and apologist of British colonialism Lord Macaulay had once confessed to this savagery of the British ‘civilised terror’: “And then was seen what we believed to be the most frightful of all spectacles, the strength of civilisation without its mercy”

In September 1857, Marx wrote in the New York Tribune: “The outrages committed by the revolted Sepoys in India are indeed appalling, hideous, ineffable – such as one is prepared to meet only in wars of insurrections, of nationalities, of races, and of above all of religion… However… it is only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India… To characterise that rule, it suffices to say that torture formed an organic institution of its financial policy. There is something in human history like retribution, and it is a rule of historic retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but by the offender himself… ”

Lord Macaulay was a leading member of the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838, who considered Indian society and languages as pedestrian and inferior. Macaulay divided the world into civilised nations and barbarism, with Britain in his view representing the high point of civilisation. Macaulay was also the main protagonist in abolishing Persian as the official and educational language of India before the British occupation. He was the main architect of the imperial jurisprudence introduced in the colonies. After the revolt of 1857 his jurisprudence imparted for the colonies became known as The 1860 Indian Penal Code. This jurisprudence is still practised as the legal system of India, Pakistan, Singapore, Srilanka, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and other former British colonies.

Macaulay also destroyed the educational and vocational system of learning in the subcontinent replacing it with western education and creating a native anglicised elite that would be the crucial buffer and support to perpetuate the British colonial rule. He wrote, “I feel… that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.”

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign