April 20, 2007
On April 13, 1919, the day of Baisakhi festival, a crowd of about 20,000 had gathered in the heart of Amritsar to protest against the killing of innocent citizens by British troops on the previous day. The meeting, being held at the Jallianvala Bagh, had started at 4.30 in the afternoon and had progressed peacefully. Two resolutions had been passed. One condemned the firing on citizens; the second called for the repeal of the Rowlatt Act. A third resolution against the general repressive policies of the British government was being proposed when a man named Reginald Edward Harry Dyer (who was ironically born at Murree in 1864), the commander of the 45th Infantry Brigade stationed at Jalandhar, arrived at the scene with 50 riflemen and two armoured cars with mounted machine guns.
Dyer arrived at about 5.15 p.m. He deployed his riflemen on an elevation near the entrance and ordered them to start shooting without issuing any warning to the crowd to disperse. For the next twenty minutes, the hapless crowd in the Bagh was under fire. In all, 1650 rounds of .303-inch ammunition were fired straight at the people who had been encircled from all sides within the low-lying garden. Then Dyer left with his soldiers. Later, he estimated that he had killed between 200 and 300 people, based on his rough calculations of one dead per six bullets fired. The official figures were 379 killed and 1200 wounded. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, who personally collected this information with a view to raising the issue in the Central Legislative Council, estimated that over 1,000 human beings were mowed down within twenty minutes of that ruthless act.
The Jallianvala Bagh massacre is one out of a very large number of massacres during the colonial occupation of lands as far apart as Amritsar, India, and Santiago, Chile. The British, the French, the Germans, the Dutch, and the Italians who colonized a very large part of the globe during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries did not consider people in these lands as human in quite the same way as themselves; they were merely illiterate savages who could be mowed down at will. What happened at Amritsar on April 13, 1919 was neither unique nor an exceptional case of one man’s madness; similar events took place all over the colonized world. The massacres in the Sétif and Guelma regions of Algeria on 8 May 1945, the massacre in the Island of Mauritius which killed over a thousand men, women, and children, the 1906 massacre in Nataal, the carnage at Pidjiguiti, Guinea-Bissan and Cape Verde, many massacres in Angola, and the French colonial Massacre in Bengui (Central African Republic) are but a few such cases.
The modus operandi of the colonial powers was simple: they recruited locals to serve them. These men (and in some cases women) could be hired for paltry sums. They would dutifully serve not only as cooks, drivers, interpreters, and sweepers, but also as soldiers who would kill their own kith and kin, thus saving the colonizers the trouble and expense of bringing a large force from overseas.
This modus operandi has been fine tuned during the course of the last two centuries. New names have been given to the purposes for which occupying armies arrive, new terms have been coined for massacres, and sophisticated techniques are being used to hide heinous crimes. Now occupying armies arrive to fight against terrorism and massacres are called killing insurgents. Nothing, however, has fundamentally changed in the basic reasons for the invasion and plunder of lands by the British, Europeans, and now the Americans, except the pretext under which they occupy other people’s lands.
There is, however, a great change in the mindset and behavior of those who are slaughtered in the name of the fight against terrorism. Compared to their compatriots of the previous century, more people in the occupied lands are now aware of the great tragedy in which they are the central players. This new awareness among people about the true nature of what is happening in the world is not accidental; it has emerged through a somewhat disorganized movement which is sometimes called the culture of resistance. This culture of resistance has roots in all lands of the oppressed, but its most overt manifestations belong to South America, where numerous intellectuals, writers, poets, musicians, and thinkers are attempting to anchor this movement in a systematic framework of thought.
This resistance movement is one of the greatest turning points in human history. Imagine a world in which the Americans, the British, the French, the Russians, and their allies can no longer occupy and exploit other lands! Imagine a world in which ordinary people are perpetually aware of massacres like the Jallianvala Bagh massacre and refuse to tolerate any such thing in their lands! Imagine a world in which the massacres of the Sabra and Shatila camps and the inhumanities of Abu Ghuraib and Guantanomo Bay are no longer possible. That would be a world in which human dignity can at last find its rightful expression. We are not in that world yet; tThe culture of resistance being developed in the occupying lands at great human cost is still in its infancy. It needs a much greater involvement of intellectuals, writers, artists, and other men and women who can articulate and express the hopes and desires of the oppressed in order to enhance the historical awareness of the masses.
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