Today is the anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also known as the Amritsar massacre, was a seminal event in the British rule of India. On 13 April 1919, a crowd of non-violent protesters, along with Baishakhi pilgrims, had gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh garden in Amritsar, Punjab to protest the arrest of two leaders despite a curfew which had been recently declared. On the orders of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, the army fired on the crowd for ten minutes, directing their bullets largely towards the few open gates through which people were trying to run out. The dead numbered between 370 and 1,000, or possibly more. [Wiki.]
The picture on the left shows the narrow passage to Jallianwala Bagh Garden through which the shooting was conducted. The question is: who killed those hundreds of Indians — men, women and little children — in cold blood at the orders of Gen Dyer? They were Indians. Indians killed Indians mercilessly, in cold blood. They always do. Indians kill Indians and help foreigners rule India. Here’s some evidence that you must read to understand that point.
The so-called “father” of the Indian Constitution, Mr B. R. Ambedkar, wrote this in a piece addressed to the British before India’s independence:
British Rule in India owes its very existence to the help rendered by the Untouchables. Many Britishers think that India was conquered by the Clives, Hastings, Cootes and so on. Nothing can be a greater mistake. India was conquered by an army of Indians and the Indians who formed the army were all Untouchables. British Rule in India would have been impossible if the Untouchables had not helped the British to conquer India. Take the Battle of Plassey which laid the beginning of British Rule or the Battle of Kirkee which completed the conquest of India. In both these fateful battles the soldiers who fought for the British were all Untouchables.
The invaders have always been vanishingly few relative to the Indians at any point in Indian history. Their repeated conquest and rule of India has always been possible because of treachery.
Consider the modern rule over India by an Italian woman. It is not as if she brought an Italian army to rule over India. No, she was helped by Indians to loot India.
What does this say about us Indians, and particularly Hindus? It says that we lack a sense of honor, a sense of fairness, a sense of morality.
Shame. Shame on Indians. Shame on Hindus.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 
Great point. Gurcharan Das also wrote about traitors who helped Britishers and Mughals to rule India.
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I would prefer not to take such a moral value laden stance, lets accept that humans are fallible, their values are subjective and their foresight flawed. Hindus in India are not an exception, everywhere invading forces have exploited the flaw inherent in the indigenous social order, British had in fact borrowed a lot of principles used by Spaniards in South America.
Society is a complex phenomenon with unimaginable number of causal factors, if there was a collective action from a group then they all might have faced the exact same problem and hence accepted a specific organized action as the solution. On hindsight realizing that the action was flawed is one thing but even better would be learning and correcting the causal factors which lead to that situation.
We should have known that a strict hierarchical order where individuals are born into a sort of social jail will have its own flaws, let us analyze human action within the context. We need causal explanations, sometime back i was talking to an elder relative of mine who observed that it’s fairly easy to distinguish individuals from our caste from those of the lower order, if we apply Hayekian principles to our society we can realize that for centuries our cultural and biological evolution has been restricted among the same circles and people still wonder why behavioral norms are strikingly different across different castes?
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But if the Untouchables were not treated as such and been disaffected by the pathetically moronic regressive Hindu society then it’s possible that they wouldn’t have committed the treacherous act.
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they did not do any treacherous act . All the untouchables want to fight from the side of Marathas but the proudy Maratha refused to get help from the Untouchables. How a high caste martha Peshwa Brahmin got the help of Untouchables? So to see all this Untouchables joined the british army and fought against the Maratha. So what wrong with this. If Rana Sanga called the Babur to help him against the Ibrahim lodhi of Delhi sultanate. but the Untouchables did not do such type of act as Rana sanga did.
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A lack of sense of honor, and inferiority complex, often applies to societies who were colonized. You will easily find many willing Jaichands in such places. The question will be why powerful Indian kings in 18th or 19th century India could not exploit fault lines in contemporary Western societies? Why Indians do not reverse their gaze on other societies who claim to be more enlightened?
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I is matter of great sadness when (in my limited knowledge) I find most Indians are not even aware how exactly Indians agreed to be slaves to their white master. It just cannot happen just like that, imagine how the British interpreted the classical Indian texts and pumped the poison of aryan-dravidian division. Most people are not even aware of this massive British fraud theory of Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), which was sold heavily among the Higher castes where British addressed the higher caste guys that look, you guys came from Europe lot before and we have come in late, when you guys came to India, you killed and enslaved the Dravidian guys (who are natives) and now we will elevate you guys and we are brothers so this is just out of brotherly concern that we have come to uplift you guys and please dont think that we are here to rule. This is how elites intellectuals were co-opted. In the movie Hey-Ram sequence, SRK says the same to Kamal Hasan, that you guys (aryan) are also plunderers and we (mughals) are also plunderers but we came in late. No Intellectual in India challenged this spurious AIT peddled in a 20th century India. Now is this kind of fraud in possible elsewhere in the world? The latin americans have reworded “Discovery of America” to “Invasion of America”, and they have rejected the notion that Spanish Missionary came in to liberate the pagans of the american continent. It is only in India that we dont re-claim back out history and de-toxify the texts that were interpreted by British Indologists/historians. This manusmriti which says that lower castes are born out of feet is the interpreted text and re-written in London by Sankskrit scholars who went to London to translate them into English. The same sanskrit text were given to multiple pundits and translated text were compared and in case of discrepancies the retribution was severe. From 1800 onwards all translated works on Indian classics have been poisoned. All this was a massive scam, how to enslave a nation by re-writing the history and then takeover with least resistance from natives.
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“we lack a sense of honor, a sense of fairness, a sense of morality”
Harsh but true. I have repeated this umpteen times at random places but was overpowered by jingoistic morons.
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You laid out the context well and I agree with you. Shame on us…shame on me as a Hindu. As somebody else said in the comments, we need to understand and rewrite our history.
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France, Holland, Poland – to name a few – were occupied by Germany only for a couple of years – and we have read about the degradation of a section of population in these countries in working for the invaders in sending their own to gallows in droves. Compare that with occupation of india by different plunderers since AD 700 till date. It is amazing that even today a great many of Indians have magnificent qualities.
History is written by winner. If we have have the real independence victory on May 16, we can look forward to better days.
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Not so quick to condemn please. Two different quotes:
Quote no. 1
By 1887, alongside the Gurkhas, most recruits for the Bengal Army came from the Punjab, which had remained loyal during the Mutiny and where the Sikhs dominated, although Punjabi Muslims were also prized as recruits. Indeed, by 1914, 75% of the Indian army comprised those alleged martial races. Moreover, with the growth of race ideology British recruiters were concerned they should have the right sort of troops to fight a Russian invasion of India through Afghanistan, which was expected at any time and remained the focus of British fears until 1907. Thus northern, lighter skinned Indians, believed to have originated from ancient ‘Aryan’ conquerors, were considered far superior troops to the darker skinned southern Indians who comprised the Madras and Bombay armies. From: Journal of Victorian Culture
Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2007
pp. 146-150 | 10.1353/jvc.2007.0017
Quote no. 2
No one knows for sure how many Americans remained loyal to Great Britain. The Massachusetts political leader, John Adams, thought about thirty-three percent of the colonists supported independence, thirty-three percent supported Britain, and thirty-three percent supported neither side. Most history experts today think that about twenty percent of the colonists supported Britain. They say the others were neutral or supported whichever side seemed to be winning.
As many as thirty thousand Americans fought for the British during the war. Others helped Britain by reporting the movements of American rebel troops.
Who supported Britain? They included people appointed to their jobs by the king, religious leaders of the Anglican Church, and people with close business connections in Britain.
Many members of minority groups remained loyal to the king because they needed his protection against local majority groups. Other people were loyal because they did not want change or because they believed that independence would not improve their lives. Some thought the actions of the British government were not bad enough to make a rebellion necessary. Others did not believe that the rebels could win a war against such a powerful nation as Britain.
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My comments: the fact is we cannot judge the men of those times by our standards. For somebody from a village fighting in the armies of the Mughal from Delhi thousands of miles away and fighting in an English army was probably no different since there was no concept of distance beyond a limited radius around the village.
There is no data to support this but I would wager that Hindus contain no more or less traitors than any other group you care to name.
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Why this emphasis on Hindus? This is divisive.
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Why are you calling the Untouchables ‘traitors’ in first place? Caste Hindus never considered them one of their own. They were humiliated for centuries.We can even say that, even though they were born in India, India never excepted them. Then why are we Indians expecting any favors from a community which we never showed any favor in first place. They only sided Britishers because they believed Britishers will change their fortunes, which they ultimately did. And show some respect to Dr.B.R.Ambedkar. This man wrote a vast constitution in two years all on his own. Look at constitutions of others nations surrounding India, they are either still in making or have already collapsed. We should be thankful he didn’t ask for a separate nation for Dalits like Jinnah did with Pakistan, because entire Dalit community would stand for his words. Even today he is the most followed leader in India’s history. Only invisible gods are revered like him!
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