Nehru: The Invention of India

by Shashi Tharoor

The event that sealed the fate of the British Raj in India, that underlined Gandhi’s leadership of the national movement and that irrevocably brought Jawaharlal and Motilal Nehru to the conviction that nothing short of independence was acceptable, occurred on 13 April 1919, in the town of Amritsar. It was Baisakhi, the major spring holiday, and over 10,000 people had gathered in a walled open area, the Jallianwalla Bagh, for a peaceful gathering of satyagrahis protesting British iniquities. Brigadier-General R. E. H. Dyer, the newly-arrived local military commander, saw the meeting as an affront and the crowd of unarmed men and women, some with their families, as an incipient mob. He ordered his troops to take up positions around the enclosure, from which there was only a single narrow exit. And though there is no record of any act by the crowd, any provocation that could be cited as triggering his decision, Dyer ordered his men, standing behind the brick walls surrounding the Bagh, to level their rifles at the assembled men, women and children barely 150 yards away and fire. There was no warning, no announcement that the gathering was illegal and had to disperse, no instruction to leave peacefully: nothing. Dyer did not order his men to fire in the air, or at the feet of their targets. They fired, at his orders, into the chests, the faces, and the wombs of the unarmed and defenceless crowd. History knows the event as the Amritsar Massacre. The label connotes the heat and ...