Students of Indian history will know of the Rowlatt Act, which gave the British in India to hold in custody anybody they wanted for over two years without trial or for that matter, reason. Of course, there were those who did not agree and among them were Madan Mohan Malviya and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. These leaders announced a protest in Jalianwala Bagh, where children also went to play in large numbers.

Anyway, when told of talk of protest, Brtish Raj gave a warning, which the Indian leaders heard loud and clear, but did not reach the ears of the common aam aadmi, and definitely not those of the children for whom Jalianwala Bagh was playground and fun-ground. So, a sizeable crowd gathered at the venue and news of the ‘Revolt over Rowlatt’ reached the Brits.

A British Indian Army officer was sent to teach the natives discipline. Brig-Gen Reginald Dyer was more than disciplinarian. He took machine-guns along but when those could not get past the entry gates, he ordered his troops to line up and empty their guns on the crowds. And when the rifles emptied, he ordered the rifles reloaded and emptied into the crowds, again. The people gathered including children had no chance. They fell like cut wheat.

Shaheed Bhagat Singh was one of the children who used to frequent Jalianwala Bagh. That day, at the time he wasn’t at Jalianwala. But he went after everything was over and saw the dead and wounded. He was 12 at the time. ‘Jalianwala’ shaped Bhagat Singh’s thoughts and his radicalization was a direct result of the massacre. The British, who hanged him to death along with Shivaram Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar, probably understood this better than others.

There were two killers among the British with similarly sounding names — Brig-Gen Reginald Dyers and Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer, Guv of Punjab, who was the one who ordered Gen. Dyer to “empty all guns” into the crowd. O’Dwyer met his end at the hands of Udham Singh in London’s Caxton Hall. Dyer died of cerebral haemorrhage and arteriosclerosis years before.

But to this day, the British Government has not apologized for the massacre though it has repeated enough number of times that it was a dastardly act, and a shameful act. Other than packing off to Dyer to England, no other action was taken against him or Dwyer. Sure, he smoked himself to death but that is a risk every tobacco user takes and is not punishment for murder and massacre.

April 10, ahead of the 100th anniversary of the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre, British Prime Minister Theresa May expressed regret over the worst bloodbath committed by the colonial British Army, terming it as “shameful scar” on British Indian history but stopped short of tendering an apology. Earlier, Prime Minister David Cameron had also refused to apologize.

Earlier this year, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor and CPI(M) Kerala MP MB Rajesh had in Parliament sought that the Modi Government seek and extract an apology for the Jalianwala Bagh Massacre but that plea or demand went begging and the NDA, which includes the Shiromani Akali Dal, Government did not think it important enough to ask from Theresa May, not even on the 100th anniversary of a dastardly act that was much, much worse than a “shameful scar.” (IPA Service)