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Updated: May 24, 2025
But a man who is in a state of rage whose heart has become lacerated does not count the cost of his action. So much for the Khilafat wrong. I propose to take you for a minute to the Punjab, the northern end of India. And what have both Governments done for the Punjab? I am free to confess again that the crowds in Amritsar went mad for a moment.
A Traveller who at this day passes Amritsar by train will, if he looks to the south, see hard by the formidable fortress of Gorindghar. Over its battlements now floats the Union Jack, and on its drawbridge may be seen the familiar red coat of the British sentry.
Even when all allowance is made for the more dangerous situation created by a more martial population and the proximity of an always turbulent North-Western Frontier with the added menace at that time of an Afghan invasion, nothing can justify what was done at Amritsar where the deliberate bloodshed at Jallianwala has marked out April 13, 1919, as a black day in the annals of British India.
At noon, therefore, on a hot September day the little party set off on their forty mile march along the dusty, treeless road to Amritsar. Subadar, a native commissioned officer commanding a company of infantry. Marching all that day, and the greater part of the following night, Rasul Khan arrived in the vicinity of the fort just as day was breaking.
And it is my deliberate conviction that Sir Michael O'Dwyer was totally unfit to hold the office of Lieutenant Governor of Punjab and that his policy was primarily responsible for infuriating the mob at Amritsar. Do doubt the mob excesses were unpardonable; incendiarism, murder of five innocent Englishmen and the cowardly assault on Miss Sherwood were most deplorable and uncalled for.
But in spite of the foreboding and the grave warnings of friends, at the Amritsar Congress in 1919 I fought for co-operation and working the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, hoping that the Prime Minister would redeem his promise to the Indian Mussalmans, that the Punjab wound would be healed and that the reforms inadequate and unsatisfactory though they were, marked a new era of hope in the life of India.
General Dyer has been haltingly blamed, and his evil genius Sir Michael O'Dwyer entirely exonerated because Englishmen do not want to leave this country of fields even if everyone of us has to be killed. If we go mad again as we did at Amritsar, let there be no mistake that a blacker Jallianwala will be enacted. Shall we copy Dyerism and O'Dwyerism even whilst we are condemning it?
May we say at once that in so far as the British Empire stands for the domination and exploitation of other races for Britain's benefit, for degrading treatment of any, for traffic in intoxicating liquors, for repressive legislation, for administration such as that which to the Amritsar incidents, we desire the end of it as much as you do?
The preoccupations of the Afghan war which followed closely on the Punjab troubles were no doubt absorbing, but had the Viceroy or the Home member or the Commander-in-Chief or one of his responsible advisers proceeded in person, the moment the disorders were over, to Lahore or Amritsar, barely more than a night's journey from Delhi or Simla, is it conceivable that a halt would not have been forthwith called to proceedings which these high officers of state were constrained later on unanimously to deplore and reprobate?
"'That question I cannot answer. Unless I have the horoscope of her highness, cast by skilled hands at the time of her birth, I cannot tell which planet rules her destiny. "'Alas, we knew not these things among my people down in Amritsar, I heard my lady murmur. "'Bah! exclaimed the serving woman contemptuously.
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