Hans Raj (approver)

In early 1919, Hans Raj became active in the non-violent disobedience or Satyagraha movement and began to participate in protests against British rule in India.

He was appointed the joint secretary of the Satyagraha organisation in Amritsar and worked to help local Indian leaders Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal, whose arrests and deportation on 10 April 1919 triggered riots.

He subsequently took a job as a correspondence clerk for a Municipal Commissioner at Amritsar, became a banker and then a medical and stationary agent, but was frequently found to be unable to hold down employment due to his dishonesty.

[1] In 1917, Hans Raj joined the Home Rule League and was relatively quiet and unknown until early 1919, at the age of 23, when he began to participate in the protests against the Rowlatt Acts,[1] British repressive legislation set to continue specific wartime powers for use against conspiracies and terrorist activities by revolutionaries.

[4] On 10 April 1919, the Indian political leaders Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal were summoned to deputy commissioner Miles Irving's home on the orders of Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab.

The incident triggered a petition for their release and subsequent local riots, where a number of both Europeans, including the school teacher Marcella Sherwood, and Indians were injured and killed, and official buildings defaced.

[7] An eye-witness statement by a Mr Girdhari Lal, who watched the event from his window which overlooked the Bagh described "there was not a corner left of the garden facing the firing line where people did not die in large numbers…blood was pouring in profusion".

[2][4] According to historian Kim A. Wagner, Hans Raj "became integral to the effort to implicate as many of the local nationalists and Satyagraha volunteers as possible, first identifying people and subsequently coaching their confessions".

[4] A system long established in British India, an approver such as Hans Raj was a suspect who provided a testimony which identified their associates in return for his own freedom.

[4] According to the lawyer Pearay Mohan, who wrote a book on the Punjab of 1919, titled An Imaginary Rebellion (1920), Hans Raj was a secret agent for the police all along and disclosed his testimonies without expectation of any reward.

[2] Various extents of Hans Raj's involvement with police were also noted by Charles Freer Andrews, M. R. Jayakar, Madan Mohan Malaviya,[9] and historian V. N. Datta[8][10] who wrote that Hans Raj assisted General Dyer in planning the massacre[11] and expected the shootings on 13 April, going as far as to build a wooden platform designed to provide himself with a hiding place during the shooting.