Jallianwala Bagh massacre

A large crowd had gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, British India, during the annual Baisakhi fair to protest against the Rowlatt Act and the arrest of pro-Indian independence activists Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal.

In response to the public gathering, the temporary brigadier general R. E. H. Dyer surrounded the people with his Gurkha and Sikh infantry regiments of the British Indian Army.

[10] The level of casual brutality and the lack of any accountability stunned the entire nation,[11] resulting in a wrenching loss of faith of the general Indian public in the intentions of the United Kingdom.

[12] The attack was condemned by the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, as "unutterably monstrous", and in the UK House of Commons debate on 8 July 1920 Members of Parliament voted 247 to 37 against Dyer.

Mahatma Gandhi, recently returned to India, began emerging as an increasingly charismatic leader under whose leadership civil disobedience movements grew rapidly as an expression of political unrest.

[21] The recently crushed Ghadar conspiracy, the presence of Raja Mahendra Pratap's Kabul mission in Afghanistan (with possible links to Bolshevik Russia), and a still-active revolutionary movement especially in Punjab and Bengal (as well as worsening civil unrest throughout India) led to the appointment of a sedition committee in 1918 chaired by Sidney Rowlatt, an Anglo-Egyptian judge.

[29] James Houssemayne Du Boulay is said to have posited a direct causal relationship between the fear of a Ghadarite uprising in the midst of an increasingly tense situation in Punjab, and the British response that ended in the massacre.

The demonstration was to demand the release of two popular leaders of the Indian Independence Movement, Satyapal and Saifuddin Kitchlew, who had been arrested by the government and moved to a secret location.

A series of resolutions protesting against the Rowlatt Act, the recent actions of the British authorities and the detention of Satyapal and Kitchlew was drawn up and approved, after which the meeting adjourned.

This notice was not widely disseminated, and many villagers gathered in the Bagh to celebrate the Baisakhi festival and to peacefully protest against the arrest and deportation of two national leaders, Satyapal and Saifuddin Kitchlew.

Because the city police closed the fair at 14:00 that afternoon, many of those who had been attending it drifted into the Jallianwala Bagh, further increasing the number of people who happened to be there when the massacre began.

The following morning's newspapers quoted an erroneous initial figure of 200 casualties, offered by the Associated Press, e.g., "News has been received from the Punjab that the Amritsar mob has again broken out in a violent attack against the authorities.

[6] At the meeting of the Imperial Legislative Council held on 12 September 1919, the investigation led by Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya concluded that there were 42 boys among the dead, the youngest of them only 7 months old.

[59] Dyer reported to his superiors that he had been "confronted by a revolutionary army", to which Major General William Beynon replied via telegram: "Your action correct and Lieutenant Governor approves.

[68] In the repudiation letter, dated 31 May 1919 and addressed to the Viceroy of India, Lord Chelmsford, he wrote "I ... wish to stand, shorn, of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen who, for their so called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.

Gupta quotes from Tagore's letter to the Viceroy, stating "The enormity of the measures taken by the Government in Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has, with a rude shock, revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India ... [T]he very least that I can do for my country is to take all consequences upon myself in giving voice to the protest of the millions of my countrymen, surprised into dumb anguish of terror.

Over the next several months, while the commission wrote its final report, the British press, as well as many MPs, turned increasingly hostile towards Dyer as the full extent of the massacre and his statements at the inquiry became widely known.

The officer commanding the Royal Air Force in India, Brigadier General N D K MacEwen, later stated that: I think we can fairly claim to have been of great use in the late riots, particularly at Gujranwala, where the crowd when looking at its nastiest was absolutely dispersed by a machine using bombs and Lewis guns.

[83] On 13 March 1940, at Caxton Hall in London, Udham Singh, an Indian independence activist from Sunam who had witnessed the events in Amritsar and who had been wounded there, shot and killed Michael O'Dwyer, the lieutenant-governor of Punjab at the time of the massacre, who had approved Dyer's action and was believed to have been the main planner.

"[85] In fascist countries, the incident was used for anti-British propaganda: Bergeret, published in large scale from Rome at that time, while commenting upon the Caxton Hall assassination, ascribed the greatest significance to the circumstance and praised the action of Sardar Udham Singh as courageous.

A memorial, designed by American architect Benjamin Polk, was built on the site and inaugurated by President of India Rajendra Prasad on 13 April 1961, in the presence of Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders.

[89] The students pushed for an anti-British movement and the result was the formation of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabhandak Committee on 15 November 1920 to manage and to implement reforms in Sikh shrines.

[93][94] During the same visit, Philip and his guide Partha Sarathi Mukherjee came to a plaque stating that "about two thousand Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims ... were martyred in a non-violent struggle" at the site.

[95][94][96][97] Indian journalist Praveen Swami wrote in Frontline magazine:[95] That [this was] the solitary comment Prince Philip had to offer after his visit to Jallianwala Bagh[,] ... [and] the only aspect of the massacre that exercised his imagination, caused offence.

Perhaps more important of all, the staggering arrogance that Prince Philip displayed in citing his source of information on the tragedy made clear the lack of integrity in the wreath-laying.There are long-standing demands in India that Britain should apologise for the massacre.

Vincent said that "overdrastic and severe action, excessive use of force and acts ... reasonably interpreted as designed to humiliate Indian people ... cannot but be regarded as unpardonable (and) morally indefensible."

Writing in The Telegraph, Sankarshan Thakur stated: "Over nearly a century now British protagonists have approached the 1919 massacre ground of Jallianwala Bagh thumbing the thesaurus for an appropriate word to pick.

Although she did not issue an apology, British Prime Minister Theresa May called the 1919 shooting of unarmed civilians a "shameful scar", echoing the 2013 statement made by David Cameron.

[106] On 15 April 2019, a national memorial event titled "Jallianwala Bagh 100 Years On" was held in the British Parliament, hosted by Jasvir Singh and organised by City Sikhs and the Faiths Forum for London.

[109] On Christmas Day, 2021, Jaswant Singh Chail entered the grounds of Windsor Castle, where Queen Elizabeth II was living, intending to assassinate her with a crossbow.