Rowlatt Committee

The purpose of the Rowlatt Committee was to evaluate political terrorism in India,[1] especially in the Bengal and Punjab Provinces, its impact, and the links with the German government and the Bolsheviks in Russia.

[2][3] It was instituted towards the end of World War I when the Indian revolutionary movement had been especially active and had achieved considerable success, potency and momentum and massive assistance had been received from Germany, which planned to destabilise British India.

A further reason for institution of the committee was emerging civil and labour unrest in India around the post-war recession - such as the Bombay mill worker's strikes and unrest in Punjab[citation needed] - and the 1918 flu pandemic that killed nearly 13 million people in the country.

[2] The agitation unleashed by the acts culminated on 13 April 1919, in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, Punjab when the Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, blocked the main entrance to the Jallianwallah Bagh, a walled-in courtyard in Amritsar, and ordered his British Indian Army soldiers to fire into an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd of some 6,000 people who had assembled there in defiance of a ban.

A total of 1,650 rounds were fired, killing 379 people (as according to an official British commission; Indian estimates ranged as high as 1,500.