Thread by @KimAtiWagner

The Amritsar Massacre Fact-Check Part II: Recently, a number of peculiar claims have been made in the press about the Amritsar Massacre and its legacies, that warrant a closer look.

A thread

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Claim: The fact that Dyer was made an honorary Sikh in the aftermath of the massacre shows that Sikhs supported him (and his actions).

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The manager of the Golden Temple, Arur Singh, who personally honoured Dyer, had been put in office by the British in 1907 and was awarded a CIE in 1913. The Sikh reform movement, the Akali Dal, was highly critical of Arur Singh, who was eventually forced to step down in 1920.
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Dyer’s apotheosis and investment with the symbolic emblems of a Sikh was thus an explicitly political gesture by a colonial stooge, rather than one which reflected the genuine sentiments of the local population more generally.

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Claim: The number of Muslims killed at Jallianwala Bagh reveals that they were not really involved in the protests of the time and that Hindu-Muslim unity was a myth.

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The number of Muslims among the victims at Jallianwala Bagh actually says nothing about Muslim participation in the protests. Many of those gathered on 13 April did not know what the meeting was about, and there were lots of people who simply happened to be in the Bagh.

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British and Indian eyewitness-accounts from Amritsar all make describe the unprecedented displays of unity between Hindus and Muslims during the protests. It was indeed the spectre of Hindus and Muslims uniting against the British that triggered fears of a second ‘Mutiny’.

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Claim: The lessons of Amritsar prevented the British from intervening in the violence of Partition.

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The notion that the lessons of the Amritsar Massacre prevented the British from interfering in the genocidal violence of Partition in 1947, however, has no basis whatsoever in historical fact.

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Anyone familiar with the Croke Park massacre (1920), the suppression of the Moplah Rebellion (1921) or the Qissa Khwani Bazaar massacre (1930), would know what British ‘riot-control’ post-Amritsar actually meant.

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Minimum Force did not entail restraint and British counterinsurgency during the interwar and post-1945 period in Ireland, Palestine, Malaya, Kenya and elsewhere was not characterized by any noticeable reluctance to shoot unarmed civilians.

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Claim: Churchill's description of Dyer's actions as 'unprecedented' and the massacre as 'sinister', 'isolated' and 'monstrous', reveals that Dyer, and the logic on which he relied, was in fact unique.

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Churchill’s critique of Dyer was not, however, a disavowal of colonial violence – as the tactics deployed by the Black and Tans in Ireland just a few months later, and indeed Churchill’s own record before and after 1919, revealed.

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Churchill denounced Dyer in order to rehabilitate the Empire – not because he thought exemplary and indiscriminate violence was unacceptable.

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That some of these erroneous claims have been made in an article titled ‘Amritsar has claimed a final victim: truth’ is of course deeply ironic…

#FactsMatter

PS: All of the material referred to is in my book, with full references…

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