The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre
On this day · 13 April 1919
On a spring afternoon in Amritsar, British troops sealed the only exit and fired on thousands of trapped, unarmed civilians.
On 13 April 1919, thousands of unarmed men, women and children gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed public garden in Amritsar, in the Punjab region of British India. Many had come for the spring Baisakhi festival; others were defying a ban on public meetings to protest the repressive Rowlatt Acts.
Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer marched in roughly fifty riflemen, blocked the garden’s single narrow exit, and ordered them to open fire without any warning. The shooting continued for some ten minutes, until the troops had nearly exhausted their ammunition. Penned in by high walls, the crowd had almost nowhere to flee.
An official inquiry put the dead at 379; Indian estimates ran far higher, with well over a thousand wounded.
The massacre became a watershed in the history of British India. The outrage it provoked, in both India and Britain, helped fuel Mahatma Gandhi’s independence movement and left a lasting scar on Anglo-Indian relations. Dyer was relieved of command and forced to retire.
Sources & references
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