A Sense of the Enemy

by Shore, Zachary

  By repeatedly stoking Indian anger over Amritsar, Gandhi simultaneously fueled the self-rule movement while elevating himself and his cause to international prominence.8 In fact, in the very same document in which he charged the British government as being “evilly manned,” Gandhi also remarked that his speeches were “intended to create disaffection” in order that the Indian people would feel ashamed if they cooperated with the government.9 Throughout the 1920s, Gandhi heaped his criticism of the British upon the pyres of Indian nationalism, hoping to inflame Indian opinion. The massacre, coupled with the perceived injustice over Dyer’s light punishment, could hardly have been better suited to the task.

  Gandhi also strove to keep the memory of Amritsar alive in order to foster Hindu–Muslim unity, since members of both religions had been killed there.10 In this way, he used General Dyer’s atrocity to serve the cause of independence. Building and maintaining amity between India’s two largest religious groups remained one of Gandhi’s prime objectives throughout his long drive for independence. He understood that a country riven by internal hatreds could not and would not survive intact, and he was determined to prevent the fracturing of India along religious lines. By encouraging all Indians to contribute money to a Jallianwala Bagh memorial, Gandhi believed he could construct a monument to religious harmony that would be a symbol of joint suffering at the hands of a common foe. In February 1920, Gandhi wrote: “In visiting the Bagh, our purpose is not to remind ourselves of General Dyer’s cruelty. Men have always made mistakes. We do not want to keep alive the memory of General Dyer’s wrong and thereby feed our hatred.” Instead he saw it as a chance to raise the nation to a higher cause. And then he added: “Maybe we cannot bring about such a miraculous result from the slaughter of the innocent people in the Jallianwala Bagh; the event, however, will always be recognized as a potent influence in uniting Hindus and Muslims and in creating an awakening throughout the land.” On February 18, 1920, Gandhi reiterated that the massacre must serve Hindu–Muslim unity. This, he insisted, was the primary meaning of the memorial. He reminded his readers that the blood of the Mohammedan had mixed with that of the Hindu, signifying their shared sacrifice. “The memorial,” he opined, “should be a national emblem of an honest and sustained effort to achieve Hindu–Muslim unity.”11

  General Dyer had meant to quash a rebellion, but instead he fueled a movement that would eventually bring down the Raj. Gandhi deployed the massacre’s memory to sting the British conscience over the injustice of colonial rule—and it worked.12 Yet despite all his assertions of British evil and injustice, the Mahatma knew that most British leaders were repelled by what Dyer had done. Having had many years of exposure to British society, both from studying law in London and through interactions with British administrators in South Africa, Gandhi had developed a familiarity with various strands of British thinking about liberalism and empire. The question he now faced was which strand would prove stronger in the Dyer debate.

  By early December 1919, Gandhi had concluded that British officials were repenting for Amritsar. “They may not do so in public, and General Dyer may say what he likes,” Gandhi observed, but “they do feel ashamed, none the less. They dimly realize that they have made a mistake and, I am certain that, if we go about our task in a clean way, the time will come when they will repent openly.”13 On December 31, referring to the Queen’s 1858 Proclamation granting Indians equality under the law, Gandhi made his point about British leaders explicit. The proclamation, he declared, “gives one an insight into the true British character.” Gandhi saw Dyer as an aberration, a “man becoming devil under fear.” In contrast, he viewed the royal decree, along with the Montagu Reforms of 1917, as evidence of British leaders’ intention to do justice to India. Gandhi even made a point of calling the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, a “true friend to India” and someone who had earned the gratitude of all Indians.14

  Gandhi had read his enemy correctly. The Amritsar pattern break showed not that the British were evil but that they suffered deep remorse. In the massacre’s aftermath a sizeable segment of the British public and its leaders ardently opposed Dyer’s form of repression. Edwin Montagu found the cold-blooded killings so objectionable that he launched an inquiry into the entire affair and spoke passionately before the House of Commons against the atrocity. Though the subsequent report of Lord Hunter’s committee largely exonerated General Dyer—which rightly outraged most Indians—it did lay bare much of the “frightfulness” of his deeds in grim detail. As for the humiliating crawling order, no one above Dyer in the military chain of command saw any need for such excess. Even the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, who supported Dyer to the end, rescinded the order once he learned of it.15

  As reports of the atrocity filtered back to London, reaction was extreme. A vocal segment of conservatives hailed Dyer as a hero, dubbing him the man who saved India. A campaign spearheaded by the Morning Post raised a stunning 28,000 pounds for the General, making him suddenly a wealthy man.16 But a more significant part of the public felt sickened by the affair. Both the left-of-center Manchester Guardian and the right-of-center Times of London harshly criticized the General’s actions.17

  Britain’s political leaders proved no less ardent in their views. In June, at the Labour Party’s annual conference, the delegates boldly demonstrated their opinion by unanimously resolving that the officers in Punjab be recalled and tried and all repressive legislation be repealed. As for the governing Liberal Party, it too could not stomach what Dyer had done. It sought to sack the General at once, but the conservatives demanded a debate in Parliament. It was in this protracted session that British leaders exposed their true convictions. Most could not condone Dyer’s brutal ways.

  Gandhi’s collected writings during this time evidence that he stayed abreast of debates in the House of Commons. They do not appear to indicate a direct reference to these debates on General Dyer, but it is highly doubtful that Gandhi would have ignored them. Anyone interested in gauging the British leaders’ sentiments and predicting their likely responses to future protests would have found in those speeches valuable nuggets of information. However, even if he had not read the newspaper synopses of those speeches, by 1920 Gandhi had already decided to use the Jallianwala Bagh atrocity to further his cause. The knowledge of what was said in Parliament would not have altered his course; it would only have further substantiated his convictions regarding the British character.

  On July 8, 1920, the House of Commons met in a caustic and incendiary session to determine General Dyer’s fate. The General was present in the chamber, along with Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor for the Punjab. The debate began with a speech by Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, who lambasted Dyer. Conservatives shouted him down, interrupting, badgering, and bullying him at every turn. The Conservatives who taunted Montagu despised him on multiple counts. They resented his 1917 reforms, which they saw as lessening the power of the British Raj and weakening the empire as a whole. They also disliked him on racial grounds. Montagu was Jewish, and those Conservatives loathed the idea that a gallant Brigadier could be skewered by a “crooked Jew.”18

  Despite the Conservatives’ verbal battering, Montagu spoke forcefully against what Dyer had done. He put the matter bluntly, equating support for Dyer’s actions with support for terrorism. “Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial humiliation and subordination, and frightfulness,” the Secretary asked, “or are you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill, of the people of your Indian Empire?”19

  The deadly trap with a policy of terrorism, Montagu explained, is that it compels the wielders to apply ever more force against ever-growing opposition. There can be no end to it, he continued, until the Indian people rise up and terminate your rule. Montagu maintained that the only viable alternative was for Britain to enable India to become a completely free partner in the Commonwealth. He implored the House to say to Indians: “We h
old British lives sacred, but we hold Indian lives sacred, too.”20

  Naturally, those who supported General Dyer did not appreciate being likened to terrorists. Those who spoke on the General’s behalf argued that he was defending the civilian population by putting down a rebellion. Had he not acted with decisiveness, many more lives would have been lost. The English population, especially the women, were deeply grateful to Dyer for safeguarding their lives and their honor. The Sikhs, whose Golden Temple sits in Amritsar and who had long comprised a reliable part of the British military, offered to make Dyer an honorary Sikh in gratitude for his preservation of law and order. It was unfair, Dyer’s supporters charged, for those who sat comfortably in London, thousands of miles from the scene and more than a year after the event, to judge the General for doing what he deemed necessary under the circumstances. It was wrong, they insisted, to break a man after thirty-four years of exemplary service for having committed an error of judgment.

  Labour members took a rather different stand. Mr. B. G. Spoor asserted that until we “recognise the sacredness of Indian life as on a par with the sacredness of European life . . . our policy in that country will be a failure.” He called for the government to go beyond mere censuring of General Dyer and to hold all of those involved in the massacre accountable. Spoor said that Britain must eradicate the “pre-historic mental outlook” that was driving Indian unrest, and he cited the noncooperation movement that had recently awakened Indians to their plight. Spoor hoped one day to see all Indians truly free.

  Also speaking for Labour, Colonel Josiah Wedgwood went even further in support of justice. He observed that because every word said in the House that day would be read by Indians, every speech should attempt to show them that the English people unequivocally condemned the Amritsar murders.21

  The ruling Liberal government found itself besieged by both the Left and Right. Labour felt the government had not gone far enough in punishing all those involved, while Conservatives believed it had gone too far by persecuting a gallant General. Although leading Liberals such as former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith had backed Montagu, calling Amritsar “one of the worst outrages in our whole history,” the government continued to fall under furious Conservative attacks throughout the session. In hope of salvaging the government’s position, it sent to the floor one of its most articulate orators, a man known for his unshakable support of the empire, a man who himself had fought and fired on native peoples. Who better to counter charges of being soft on military matters than the current Secretary of State for War?

  Winston Churchill marched defiantly out of the nineteenth century, both hands clenched upon the jewel in the empire’s crown. From his early years in Parliament to the end of his days, Churchill never accepted the notion that Indians could rule themselves without Britain’s civilizing lead. As late as 1935, still viewing Indians as children, Churchill led a final desperate charge against the Government of India bill, which guaranteed a path to independence. His backward-looking vision met with total defeat.22 Yet even this dogmatic champion of empire broke ranks in 1920 to speak against General Dyer.

  Stunning the Commons not with his usual rhetorical pomposity but rather with a chilling account of the facts, Churchill laid out the gruesome details of precisely how Dyer’s troops slaughtered Indian civilians. He stressed that the Amritsar assembly was neither armed nor attacking—facts that made Dyer’s decision an act of murder, not an act of self-defense, and therefore thoroughly indefensible. The massacre, he declared, was unparalleled in the history of the British Empire; it was “a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.” “We have to make it absolutely clear, some way or another,” he implored, “that this is not the British way of doing business.”23

  The Empire had never, and indeed could never, rely on force alone, he averred. In every part of the Empire, he continued, the British have always aimed at “close and effectual cooperation” with the native peoples. General Dyer should not simply have been censured, Churchill concluded, but disciplined and forced to retire. While his speech in no way signaled a softening of his intention to maintain British dominion over India, it demonstrated his core conviction that abject brutality could not be tolerated. In the end, Churchill’s and the government’s position triumphed. Both of the motions to reduce Montagu’s salary—symbolic gestures meant to register opposition to the government’s forced retiring of Dyer—were overwhelmingly defeated. The vote totals themselves indicated how the mainstream of British leaders stood, since the Conservatives held the vast majority of seats. Only the diehard fringe supported Dyer’s deeds. General Dyer left the Commons with his reputation in ruins. He would forever be remembered as the “Butcher of Amritsar.”

  Churchill’s principled stand came at some personal cost, making it all the more remarkable. Still hoping to resurrect his political career following his disastrous Gallipoli campaign of World War I, he could ill afford to lose more credibility. A neutral position on Dyer might have been politically expedient and would at least have spared him the inevitable hostile critiques. Charles Frederick Palmer, a member of Parliament speaking in Dyer’s defense, denigrated Churchill for having cost more lives than anyone sitting in the chamber.24 The Morning Post seized on Palmer’s remarks, comparing the 379 Indian lives taken at Dyer’s hands to the more than 41,000 killed and captured at Gallipoli.25 The words stung, but Churchill understood the distinction between military debacles and mass murder. He hoped that the bulk of the British people would grasp it as well.

  Anyone who hoped to gauge the likely success of nonviolence as a strategy for defeating the British Empire could have learned much from Amritsar and its aftermath, particularly when contrasted with a previous atrocity of comparable magnitude. The savage British suppression of the 1857 mutiny was not followed by any public soul searching. There were no government-sponsored reparations to the victims’ dependents, no calls by opposition parties for the trial of those officers responsible, and certainly no debates in the House of Commons describing the British acts as monstrous events. Times had changed, and a dispassionate observer could have sensed the shift.

  Amritsar was a pattern-break moment. Rather than revealing an evil empire, the episode exposed a growing British queasiness with repression. To fire on unarmed crowds had become abhorrent. A significant segment of the British public and its leaders simply no longer accepted the traditional harsh-handed response to protest. If even a stalwart imperialist like Churchill opposed the slaughter of unarmed natives, the implications for how to beat the British were profound. It meant that colonial authorities would not dare fire on great masses of peaceful protestors flouting British laws. It meant that a strategy of aggressive nonviolence could work.

  As Gandhi was absorbing the lessons of Amritsar, other Indians reacted viscerally to Britain’s meager punishment of Dyer. When Motilal Nehru, a leader of the Indian National Congress and father of the future first Indian Prime Minister, learned of the Hunter Committee’s inadequate treatment of Dyer, he famously threw every article of European clothing and furniture on a bonfire and burned it. It marked the turning point after which he became a convert to Gandhi’s point of view. Nehru was not alone. Many more Indians reacted angrily to the sense of injustice and joined the noncooperation movement with a vengeance. It was precisely what Gandhi had hoped for, and he did not hesitate to stoke the flames of indignation by pointing out that justice was not served. Although the punishment of General Dyer was far less than he deserved, the remorse surrounding the affair was greater than what that punishment suggested. It was clear to Gandhi that British remorse was real and that another Amritsar was unlikely to occur. If it did, the British and the international condemnation could only work to the ultimate benefit of independence. When Gandhi led his famous salt march to the sea in 1930 in direct defiance of British law, he did so armed with only his walking staff. The thousands of Indians who followed him stood equally unarmed in the face of colonial police. Yet not a sho
t was fired. Gandhi had gauged his enemy correctly.

  Gandhi understood that Indians would never receive justice or freedom without agitating for it. Yet because he viewed most British leaders as honorable, he cooperated with them when prudent, as he did most notably in 1931 on the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. The slow pace of reforms never made him lose heart in British liberalism. He could not have pursued nonviolence for decades without an unshakable faith in the British conscience.26

  In the end, Gandhi’s movement triggered even more than his nation’s freedom. It sparked a wave of decolonization that ended the age of empire and transformed the world. His nonviolent methods inspired national liberation leaders from Ghana to South Africa and beyond. His ideals empowered those fighting for equality in America as well, from César Chávez to Martin Luther King Jr.27 Although these global repercussions could not have been foreseen, the success of Gandhian nonviolence for India was, in fact, foreseeable, given what this episode revealed about Churchill in particular and the British leadership as a whole. If, in 1920, you had wanted to predict whether nonviolence could help win India’s independence, the Amritsar pattern break contained some vital clues.

  If the years immediately following World War I proved turbulent for India, in Europe they were bringing even more unrest. Our next leader of interest must be considered a remarkable man because of the complex and dangerous relations he navigated while in office. After the horrors of World War I, when the guns of August had fallen still, it soon became apparent that Europe was again at risk. Revolutions and political violence became the norm, and international antagonisms threatened the shaky peace. In the wake of such a devastating global conflict, the premium on properly assessing one’s opponents rose substantially. Amid extreme upheavals, a German statesman emerged who helped set his nation back on course toward stability and strength. Had he lived long enough to combat the Nazis who eventually replaced him, modern history might have taken a dramatically different turn. Unlike Gandhi, who had lived for several years in Britain and gained a firsthand sense of the people and their politics, Gustav Stresemann had far less familiarity with the new and violent Soviet regime. Yet he could hardly afford to misread it, for at the same time that Russia’s rulers were supposedly cooperating, they were also working to overthrow him.