Pyre, Lit By Empire

Jallianwala Bagh Massacre Was Not An Isolated Incident. It Was Fully In Tune With The Logic Of Colonial Violence

- Mandira Nayar

On a wet March Monday, the Jallianwala Bagh complex is crowded. The narrow passage from where Brigadier General R.E.H. Dyer ordered firing is bubblegum pink. Women in their silk saris try to stem the rain with their scarves. Children run around. Selfie-crazed teenagers whip out their phones and smile, with the green expanse in the background. Families on an Amritsar darshan dutifully look at the bullet marks. The Eternal Flame flickers at the entrance.

A century after the massacre, Jallianwala Bagh still has the power to evoke emotions. In Britain, the House of Lords sat up on February 19, apparently for the first time, to discuss the massacre and the need for Britain to apologise. But, this demand for an apology is not new. The British queen’s visit to the site in 1999 and prime minister David Cameron’s visit in 2013 had seen the demand going high-pitched.

Closer home, the site and the Jallianwala Bagh Memorial Trust—the board that manages the site—have become a battleground for petty politics between the BJP and the Congress. The BJP, with its sheer majority, passed a bill in the Lok Sabha on February 13 to remove the permanent membership of the Congress president in the Trust. This move had prompted the Congress to accuse the government of “erasing history”. Jallianwala Bagh’s legacy and the efforts to control it will continue in the days to come.

Winston Churchill, the British secretary of war during 1919-1920, referred to the massacre as “a monstrous event... without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the empire”. But, Churchill maintained that it was an anomaly— Dyer was evil, not the empire.