Thread by @Hiranyareta

Parag Tope, a descendent of Tantya Tope, on the atrocities on the civilian population (of UP) by Brit Gora during 1857.
"Once the English found the answer to the questions regarding the logistics of Operation Red Lotus, England’s reaction was immediate, specific and chilling.
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https://twitter.com/Hiranyareta/status/1419684735702470661

The counter-offensive, if it can be called that, was clearly two-pronged. First, was the offensive response, directed towards Indian non-combatants before the confrontation with Indian soldiers.
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This offensive policy targeted hundreds of thousands of Indian civilians including women and children, who were systematically and ruthlessly massacred by the English.
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However, most historical accounts simply gloss over these dark facts of history or bury them under these euphemisms.
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Amongst the books that do openly acknowledge the killings, most repeat the standard explanation that the massacre of the Indian civilians was a ‘deadly retribution for what happened at ‘Cawnpore’.
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In Spectre of Violence: The 1857 Kanpur Massacre , Rudrangshu Mukherjee discusses the barbaric slaughter of Indian villagers.
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He accurately points out that the English did not only destroy objects that were impersonal but they destroyed homesteads, human shelter and set fire to barns and fields.
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However, he concludes that by targeting the village ‘which is the locus of stories, myths and histories’, the English were attempting to ‘obliterate a culture’."

Source: "Operation Red Lotus" by Parag Tope
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And the WTF "Sekoolar-Savarnas" have been teaching in the history books since 1947? Atrocities and exploitation of Brahmins since last 5000 years. 😸

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^^Some more quotes from Tope's book on the massacring of the civilian population of mostly present-day UP.

"There is a direct, yet an invisible, link between these English policies and India’s defeat in the War.
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This link is represented by another euphemism used in many accounts in describing certain villages as ‘guilty’, which were ordered to be ‘cleared’.
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One of the key English counter measures was the campaign of Brigadier General Havelock and Lieutenant Colonel James Neill who were marching towards Kanpur from Calcutta.
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Before facing the armies of Nana Saheb and Tatya Tope near Aung, the English created a path of carnage and butchery along the Grand Trunk road.
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This created a ‘zone’ that allowed the English to freely send reinforcements as well as maintain a strong supply line for their troops. Havelock and Neill were part of a broader directive, which was part of the English offensive response to the War.
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Execution parties were sent out all along the villages where the Indian troops had marched or were possibly planning to arrive to engage the English troops.
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Neill had marked out specific villages, which had helped the Indian soldiers and could help further reinforcements. As Neill marched toward Kanpur in June, his orders were that ‘all the men inhabiting them (the villages marked out) were to be slaughtered’.
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This is in reference to two villages on the Grand Trunk road (‘guilty’ of protecting the grain).

'I proceeded with a party of the Fusiliers to the said villages and called upon the principals to appear but they had made their escape and I ordered their houses to be burnt…
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On arriving at the village named Dobaur I found it deserted and everything carried off with the exception of some grain and small quantity of gun powder and ordered Babur Singh’s house and village to be burnt…'
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Consider some references relative to Havelock and Neill’s campaign from Varanasi to Kanpur.

'A party of Fusiliers proceeded to another village belonging to the same people [who had plundered a Dak Bungalow] but it was found deserted and I ordered it to be burnt.9'
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An officer in a column moving to Kanpur related to Russell that ‘ All the villages in his front were burnt [Emphasis Added]’.10
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On the morning after the disarmament parade, the first thing he saw from the Mint was a ‘row of gallowses [sic].11

These executions have been described as ‘Colonel Neill’s hangings’.12
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Witnessing Havelock and Neill’s campaign, Bholanath Chandra, an Indian traveller writes: ‘Neill loosed his men in the city of Allahabad. Their cannon, torches and cross firing killed hundreds of natives, including old men, women, and children.
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They caught all men they could lay their hands, porter or pedlar-shopkeeper or artisan, hurrying them through a mock trial and dangle them on the nearest tree’. Nearly six thousand were killed.
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Neill’s execution parties burned all the crops; hanged every man and boy, they could catch; carelessly; purposely killed women and children in their crossfire. Babies were bayonetted and women raped and tortured.15

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‘Rebel corpses,’ said Chandra, ‘were hanging by twos and threes from branch and sign post all over the town.’ Neill did this for three weeks in Allahabad—burning villages and hanging natives, when Havelock finally caught up almost three weeks later.16
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Three weeks of burning houses and hanging natives emptied the pool of Indian labourers Neill would need for his march to Kanpur. Back in Varanasi, the hanging parties continued to make their rounds.
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In Varanasi Lieutenant Colonel James Neill hanged hundreds of suspected ‘rebels, including a number of boys accused of romping around the city beating drums and flourishing rebel flags’.17
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Over the whole of Sepoy War—there is no darker cloud than that which gathered over Allahabad in this terrible summer.
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It is on the records of our British Parliament, in papers sent home by the governor-general of India in Council, that ‘the aged, women and children are sacrificed, as well as those guilty of rebellion’.18
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Brigadier General Havelock and Lieutenant Colonel Neill and his ‘brave men’ took the battle to the Indian civilians. Neill’s instructions to Major Sydenham Renaud, his advance guard commander, were specific.
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All the villages alongside the Grand Trunk road were to be entirely destroyed. ‘Certain guilty villages were marked out for destruction, and all the men inhabiting them were to be slaughtered.
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All Sepoys of mutinous regiments not giving a good account of themselves were to be hanged’.19 On one such occasion on 9 June, weeks before the events in ‘Cawnpore’:
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One gentleman boasted of the numbers he had finished off quite ‘in an artistic manner ’, with mango-trees for gibbets and elephants for drops, the victims of this wild justice being strung up, as though for pastime, ‘in the form of a figure of eight’. [Emphasis added]20
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Major Renaud’s advance guard had over seven hundred men.21 All of Renaud’s ‘efforts were being exerted to settle the country’.
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The scene of Indian villages as described by Malleson in his Red Pamphlet was of ‘blackened homesteads, and the bodies hanging by half dozen from trees on the roadside, and nicknamed by our soldiers “acorns”, afforded ample evidence that Renaud had not been slack in his work’.26/

One official in a letter to the Daily News provided a graphic description of Neill’s operations:

Every native that appeared in sight was shot down without question, and in the morning, Colonel Neill sent out parties of his regiment…
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and burned all the villages near where the ruins of our bungalows stood, and hung every native they could catch, on the trees that lined the road. Another party of soldiers penetrated into the native city and set fire to it,
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whilst volley after volley of grape and canister was poured into the fugitives as they fled from their burning houses… and natives we employ are provided with a pass. Any man found without one, is strung up by the neck to the nearest tree.23
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Neill sent his regiment out into Indian settlements that bordered British cantonments, where they ‘burned all the villages’ and ‘hung every native they could catch’.
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Another detachment burned down the native quarter ‘whilst volley after volley of grape and cannister was poured into the fugitives as they fled from their burning houses’.24
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Patrick Grant congratulated Neill for providing for ‘every possible present circumstances as well as eventualities’, and hoped that Renaud would be guided by these same ‘admirable instructions, and by them and them only’.25
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‘Our first spring was terrible’, William Howard Russel would write of Renaud’s advance, ‘our claws were indiscriminating’. According to an officer, ‘Renauld’s executions of Natives were indiscriminate to the last degree’.
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Every possible excuse was used to attack villages. ‘Men were executed because their faces were turned the wrong way’.26 All the villages in front of them were burnt when he halted. The idea was to avoid a direct confrontation with the Indian soldiers.
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The orders to burn down villages also helped keep their men ‘exposed as little as possible’. Allahabad was being plundered by ‘lawless and reckless’ British.27
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The propaganda associated with the systematic killings was so great that newspapers had become cheerleaders for these murders. Friend of India —an English newspaper—had the following to say about the indiscriminate killings on 12 July 1857.
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Again, we note that this was published before the events at Bibighar. ‘We shall drive the rebels before us and leave nothing in our rear, but lines of burning villages and hanging bodies...’ A friend indeed.
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It is preposterous to distance the English from the Scottish murderers, or to present this genocide to be perpetuated by the British. Neither Neill nor Havelock and their men were trigger-happy.
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They were following directives and laws that were specifically created to facilitate this holocaust unleashed on the Indian civilian population. While the executioners might be Scotsmen or Irishmen, the orders came from their English bosses in Calcutta and London.
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The direct but invisible link between these gruesome policies and why the Indians lost these battles is symbolised by the chapatis in Operation Red Lotus. In what was plausibly the biggest strength for the Indians in this War revealed the primary weakness.
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Havelock and Neill’s campaign achieved some important landmarks for England. They created a ‘dead zone’, a corridor, between Kanpur all the way to Calcutta on either side of the Grand Trunk alongside the Ganga.
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This extended into the Doab region between the Ganga and the Yamuna. In military terms, the objective was to create pockets around main towns and cities that the English could use.
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These ‘pockets’ were the destroyed villages, possibly in a radius of twenty-thirty miles or more. We describe this dead zone as the ‘figure of eight’ or the F8 zone (see Figure 14 ) in the future.

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Therefore, if any large body of Indian troops would attempt to arrive at these locations they would need to have well-planned supply columns to march two or three days with food. This would restrict Indian troop movement.
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The English were able to use this zone to continue bringing in reinforcement and effectively dominate the entire belt between the Ganga and Yamuna.
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Havelock and Neill were successful breaking the back of the Indian Army by butchering civilian men, women and children in well-defined and selected pockets.
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Their glorification in English narratives and the strangely quiet response from most Indian historians exposes the dark side of the entire narrative of 1857.
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Shockingly, even today, two Indian islands in the Andaman and Nicobar continue to be named after these wanton murderers, Havelock and Neill. A free India should consider reviewing its policy of this implicit glorification of English profligacy during 1857."
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