Amritsar Massacre: Centenary

Baroness Northover Excerpts

Tuesday 19th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, for securing this very important debate. I pay tribute to the work that he and the noble Lord, Lord Desai, are doing on this matter. There have been some very passionate and personal contributions today. I was especially struck by that of the noble Baroness, Lady Verma.

We are looking at this centenary just after the one for the First World War. More than a million Indians fought for Britain in that war, 60,000 of whom were killed. I was glad that their contribution was marked, for example, at the request of my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire, in the Parliament and Bundestag choir concert, during which the immensely moving Naidu poem, “The Gift of India”, was read.

Suffrage for women was granted immediately after the First World War, largely in recognition of their role. In India, pressure for independence mounted, but as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, has pointed out, the reaction was not engagement or gratitude but the opposite. During the war, the British Government of India had passed repressive emergency powers. At its end, the expectation was that these would be eased and India would be given more autonomy. As the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, has pointed out with detailed historical perspective, the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1918 recommended limited local self-government. Instead, however, further repressive measures were passed. Widespread anger resulted, as we have heard, and Brigadier General Dyer banned all public meetings, which, he stated, would be dispersed by force if necessary.

Despite this, thousands gathered in the walled enclosure near Amritsar’s Golden Temple. Dyer marched 90 Gurkha and Indian soldiers into the enclosure and, without warning, as we have heard, they opened fire for about 10 or 15 minutes on the panicking crowd trapped there. It was reported that 379 people were killed and about 1,200 wounded, although other estimates suggest much higher casualties. Dyer also issued humiliating instructions that all Indians going along the street where a woman missionary had been attacked were to crawl on their hands and knees.

The news of the massacre provoked fierce disapproval at the time, as we have heard. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and others have said, Churchill condemned this as,

“a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/7/1920; col. 1725.]

The Hunter Committee was appointed to report. Its conclusions were damning. Dyer was strongly censured and forced to resign. Opinion at the time was divided between those who agreed with the Hunter Committee and those who thought Dyer had acted effectively, including those in this House, as others have said. Rather tongue-in-cheek, I might just point out that at the time all would have been hereditary Peers and all would have been male—so we have had a little bit of reform in the Lords.

This massacre marked a turning point in India’s modern history, as we have heard, and was the prelude to Gandhi’s full commitment to the cause of Indian nationalism and independence. In our own time, when David Cameron visited the site, as we have heard, he described the events there as “shameful”. Others, such as the writer William Dalrymple, have emphasised that the most important lesson should be that British colonial history must never be sanitised—a point that the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, also emphasised. He and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, pointed to current tragedies, which must also be our focus.

It is right that in this centenary year the history of this massacre is being laid out, and that we learn the lessons from it. Nothing is more corrosive than feelings of injustice unaddressed. Surely, on the centenary of the massacre at Amritsar, which even an inquiry at the time found unacceptable, we should be able to issue a formal apology to help address that sense of injustice unaddressed.