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He may have achieved it for the time, though the evidence on this point is conflicting, but what he achieved far more permanently and effectively was to create in the Jallianwala Bagh, purchased since then as a "Martyrs' Memorial" by the Indian National Congress, a place of perpetual pilgrimage for racial hatred.
India asked for bread and we gave her a stone a stupid, blundering act, openly deprecated at the time by all moderate unofficial opinion in India. What was the result? The Punjab disturbances and the preventive massacre of the Jallianwala Bagh.
Better for me a beggar's bowl than the richest possession from hands stained with the blood of the innocents of Jallianwala. Better by far a warrant of imprisonment than honeyed words from those who have wantonly wounded the religious sentiment of my seventy million brothers. My reading of the Gita is diametrically opposed to Sir Narayan's.
Unfortunately, bitterness was revived by the large number of Sikhs amongst General Dyer's victims at Jallianwala, most of them, according to the Sikh version, innocent country-folk, who had come into Amritsar on that day because it happened to be a Sikh religious holiday, and had merely strayed into the Bagh out of harmless and ignorant curiosity.
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?
In going to Jallianwala I had passed through the streets where, on April 10, when the disorders suddenly broke out in Amritsar, the worst excesses were committed by the Indian rioters.
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.
So when the Government of India and the Secretary of State published their belated judgment, the people of India weighed such a tardy measure of justice against the dissent of an important minority in the House of Commons and of the majority of the Lords, the stifling of discussion in the Indian Legislature, which was still more directly interested in the matter, and above all the unprecedented public subscriptions in England and in India for the glorification of General Dyer, whilst the Punjab Government was still haggling over doles to the widows and orphans of Jallianwala and, having weighed it, found it lamentably wanting, until at last the Duke of Connaught's moving speech at Delhi for the first time began to redress the balance.
He seems to think that the article he has objected to was the only thing I have ever written on General Dyer. He does not seem to know that I have endeavoured with the utmost impartiality to examine the Jallianwala massacre. And he can see any day all the proof adduced by my fellow-commissioners and myself in support of our findings on the massacre.
Then followed the Punjab horrors beginning with the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and culminating in brawling orders, public floggings and other indescribable humiliations, I discovered too that the plighted word of the Prime Minister to the Mussalmans of India regarding the integrity of Turkey and the holy places of Islam was not likely to be fulfilled.
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