The Butcher Of Amritsar And The Apostle Of Peace

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How can one presume to know the horror? A city agitating against an oppressive Rowlatt Act, deprived of water and electricity for days. 20,000 citizens, an eighth of the entire population of the town, gather in protest at Jallianwala Bagh.

"The term Bagh is a misnomer," says the Congress Report of 1919. "It is a wasteland...an irregular quadrangle...enclosed by the back walls of the houses surrounding it. The main entrance is a narrow passage...there are no other regular entrances. The ground at the entrance is at an elevation, remarkably fit for posting soldiers and firing into a crowd in front. When, therefore, General Dyer marched into the Bagh with his 90 soldiers, the crowd had no easy exit."

Dyer's rifles pumped 1,650 rounds into the unarmed gathering, directing the fire upon places where the crowd was thickest because the general had made up his mind "to punish them for having assembled". He stopped firing only when the ammunition ran out. "If I fired a little, I should be wrong in firing at all." Ten minutes, six hundred seconds, 1,650 bullets, a thousand dead. If the number was a thousandand not more, the fault was not his. On that day, Jallianwala Bagh became inseparably coupled with the term massacre.

Reaction by Gandhi....

When Mahatma Gandhi visited Jallianwala Bagh a few months later, he found it wanting in visual aesthetics. "It is not a garden but a rubbish dump...people throw refuse into it from their rear windows. There flowed in this Bagh a river of blood, the blood of innocent people. Because of this the place has become sanctified." He felt the need for "a memorial column which, without expressing ill will to anyone, will remind us of the sacrifices, through death, of the innocent...and thus convert the heap of refuse which today goes under the name of a garden into a garden indeed,...fully worthy of India."

On Dyer.

"I do not wish ill to Gen. Dyer in anyway... I have not the least desire to see him punished, were he to fall ill, I would nurse him with love. But I certainly would not have share in his sin." —Mahatma Gandhi

One read is enough to know that he was mentally sick.

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A great effort is made by his sycophants to show the leader in Gandhi and his leadership qualities, the larger than life man who could inspire millions with a single word. Read his observations about his own self again

"I do not know within the whole of my public experience a single occasion where my presence has had anything but a soothing effect on the elements of disturbance." —Mahatma Gandhi, April15, 1919

"On that bazaar day, a strong group of volunteers marched purposefully towards the Mundera bazaar with the dual motiveof challenging (en route) the authority of the police, and then picketing thefish, meat, and liquor shops in the market. The latter motive being their peculiar, arguably relevant, local extrapolation of the Gandhian ideal. The provocative confrontation turned violent; the small clutch of policemen fired at the surging picketers and withdrew into the thana; the nationalists locked them up inside, poured oil on the building, and lit it to the victory cry of "Long Live Mahatma Gandhi." The police post was gutted, and the 23 policemen inside were burnt to death."

The satya-grahis had turned violent; the first nationalist "riot" had taken place. The district Congress leaders hastily disbanded the volunteer groups, and a shaken Mahatma Gandhi called off the Civil Disobedience Movement.

(The term Satya Grahi was coined by Gandhi himself and he trained them extensivley in his ashrams to carry out his mission of non-violence.)

Prior to his arrival in Chauri-Chaura local people weaved miracles that would occur with the arrival of modern avtara of Vishnu.Read below.

How can one quantify the influence of a Mahatma in the lives of humble folk? After a cross-country tour to launch his non-cooperation movement,came Gandhiji to be omnipresent in peasant India. In Chauri Chaura, elders recall that his visit in 1921 was heralded by celestial apparitions...the village folk believed that shrubs would shoot up into trees upon his arrival. The quest for Swaraj had charged nationalist volunteers to be little the capacity of district jails, and the numerical strength of these swayam sevaks in a particular locality came to be regarded as a measure of its nationalist spirit.

(those unfamiliar with Indian Independance movement might not know much about chauri chaura incident. u can google for more information.)

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His (Gandhis') cottage is preserved unchanged, beautiful as it was. The few chosen by him ascompanions in religious community living do not live here anymore. A library documents the man.

But there were other men and women with lives less remarkable who did shed blood.They had simple homes too, which were not preserved but pillaged. They were not leaders, they were the led. Pitchforked by the decisions of greater men, they shared trauma, not companionship. Their individual histories are dead ends, too insignificant to be documented; they are remembered only in their numbers, as a suffering mass in the collective upheaval that marked the making of two nations. When Freedom came, they didn't recognise it. What kind of shaft would the nation wish to make for them?

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