Amritsar Massacre: Centenary

Lord Mawson Excerpts

Tuesday 19th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawson (CB)]

My Lords, on 2 March 1985 I was responsible for arranging the celebrations for the reopening of Kingsley Hall, in the heart of the East End of London. It was the building where Mahatma Gandhi stayed for the 10-week Round Table Conference on India in 1931. I learned about those 10 weeks in 1984 from an East End grandmother, Lylie Valentine, who met the great man. Lylie told me the real story of the man and what happened on that rooftop at Kingsley Hall all those years ago. It was a human tale of a practical, imaginative human being, an empathetic man who took on the British Empire and won.

In Amritsar, British and Gurkha troops massacred at least 379 unarmed demonstrators meeting in the city’s park. Gandhi had actively supported the British in the hope of winning partial autonomy for India. After the Amritsar massacre he was convinced that India should accept nothing less than full independence. To achieve this end he began harnessing his instinct, experience and all his many talents to organise his first campaign of mass civil disobedience against the British. His life’s work had begun.

In his film, Richard Attenborough rather brilliantly captured this tipping point in the man and the moment. In 1985 Richard turned up at Kingsley Hall in his green Rolls-Royce with his wife Sheila Sim. Together, on that March evening, we reopened the Hall to a packed street and cheering East End crowds, with fireworks and lasers firing into the night sky. Richard, like Gandhi, had not only a sense of occasion but also a moral compass, in which passion and a practical business sense that gets things done, came together, most importantly, with imagination and empathy for others. They had a willingness to imagine the world as others both see and experience it. Amritsar was a critical change moment for the Mahatma; a turning point.

Gandhi, like Mandela, dug into the detail and joined the dots in such moments. These figures were deeply immersed in the machinery and life of their communities. Their antennae were tuned, their minds and bodies engaged at a deep level. Gandhi was a disrupter. He understood that the key to the future lay beyond simple reason and argument. It was not an intellectual game; it required a costly and instinctive leap of faith. Those physical deaths in Amritsar were the trigger and Richard captured the moment.

I have been reminded, during the countless repetitive and confrontational debates in your Lordships’ House about Brexit, of the words of the late Denis Healey during the 1986 Libyan crisis: “We have listened to another manic monologue that sheds as much light as an electric drill”. The apparently fundamentalist positions that have been taken remind me, sadly, of Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, who ordered the shooting at Amritsar and was so confident he was doing the right thing. As we have heard, even the House of Lords supported him at the time.

We should commemorate the events at Amritsar, not only because of their significance for India but because there is a clue in them. Reason alone, and intellectual games across this Chamber, may not get us where we need to be. We are not facing a black-and-white choice. The clues to the future may not be in the positions we are choosing to dig into, but actually deep down in the machinery of government, both here, in Europe and in the lived experiences and consciousness of the peoples of Europe. These imaginative men would be digging into the front end, searching for common ground.

There is much in this internet age that we share with the whole of Europe as we try to reimagine our world and that of our children, but the clues are not in this Chamber. The real debate that matters is, I fear, somewhere else. Let us commemorate Amritsar, not just as a significant date for the peoples of India, but as a world event grasped by an imaginative, instinctual man who took salt from the sea and used it to change India at every level, top, middle and bottom. He joined the dots. He saw, as a doer, what talkers failed to see, so blinded were they by what they thought they knew.