The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre aka the Amritsar Massacre was done on April 13th, 1919, one hundred years ago.
General Dyer’s soldiers, the ones who murdered unarmed innocents were Sikh, Gurkha, Baluchi, Rajput troops from 2-9th Gurkhas, the 54th Sikhs and the 59th Sind Rifles. Indians murdered wholesale Indians at the command of a foreigner. How morally depraved can a people become.
Truth be told, Indians have always helped the invaders — Islamic and British — to kill Indians. It’s cultural. It’s shameful. It’s morally detestable.
Life is a Random Draw 
What is shameful is that nothing has been learned from history. The same drama is going on in Kashmir and todays general Dyers are considered heros.
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kashmir is not comparable to dyer. Most, if not all, kashmiris are unable to see things clearly, and sadly they are too sure of how they see things.
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The institution of army is such that armymen have to obey like machines to the whims of their commander.
Henry Kissinger captured the essence when he said:
“Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”
It may be interesting to reflect that all historical genocides have been acts of military troops. General populace can kill relatively few in riots.
But to indulge in mass genocides, one needs military troops.(or ‘Defense forces’)
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This post split me in half.
I always believed that if X provokes (by preaching sermon for example) Y to do some crime, it is Y who is solely responsible. X should not be punished for preaching. In fact it is an old post of Atanu which led me to form this belief about 10-15 years ago.
But the institution of military demands complete obedience to superiors. In military’s case I would hold X (for example Reginald Dyer) responsible and not the soldiers under him.
This is clearly contradictory thinking on my part. What shall be considered military and what shall be considered civilian. Very much confused and irrational, I am. Atanu is consistent in his reasoning though. However, I am finding it difficult to blame the Indian soldiers. Yet.
Sambaran
PS: I recently came across the term ‘nuremberg defense’. Very interesting term and relevant to what I wrote here.
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In Harry-Potter universe, Alastor Moody said “Scores of witches and wizards have claimed that they only did you-know-whose bidding under the influence of the imperious curse. But here’s the rub, how do we sort out the liars”.
It is clearly a variation of nuremberg-defense. I am not sure whether it is a conscious reference on part of J. K, Rowling. Oh boy! I do love Rowling.
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First off, natives should not have voluntarily enrolled in an army recruited by a colonial power. Once you sign up it is understood you will one day be shooting at your compatriots under orders from an alien commander, justified or not. It is in India’s destiny that invaders got plenty of support from natives over the centuries; unlike any other region in the world.
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What hold a nation together? It could be:
1)Sharing the same language
2)belong to the same ‘race’ group
3)Sense of same historical lineage and vision of the future
4)Same religion….
5)??…, pls add yours
Older civilisation like those of arabs, hindus, chinese… had been repeatedly beaten by the western power. Something were fucked up in those civilisational entitiies. As I mentioned before, 100 yrs ago,yes, the same year of that sad massacre in india,there started a chinese movement(the ‘May 4th’ Movement) of retrospective self-examination/shaming to the extend that Confucist moral orthodoxy was labelled as ‘cannibalism’. Arabs and hindus didn’t have similar upheaval; why? Simply because chinese civilisation is quite secular and muslim arabs can’t attach bad labels to Prophet Muhamed. Also take a good at the civilisation attributes above that hold a nation together; apparently Bharat is lacking in some major ways except religion so little wonder we heard words like ‘Hinduwah’, ‘Hindu Nationalism’. Sure many hindu nationalists would blame that massacre on ‘traitors’ but honestly it’s is just apologetics.
Fact is Hindustan was/is fractured along caste lines and caste system there is meshed with the hindu religion which the hindus can’t do without. I read that the british colonists recruited soldiers from the ‘martial races’ there and as the caste system goes/went there, those soldiers probably cared more about their ‘race’ interests more than anything else. Not the least:
https://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-201-year-old-battle-whose-memory-divides-india/91112
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/03/commemoration-of-british-military-victory-sparks-riots-in-india
Unfortunately questioning caste system could lead uncomfortably to questioning Hinduism,the sole pillar of hindu civilisation. Over the years I read the following apologetics:
–Dravidians are also ‘aryans’
–Hindu Caste system is just ‘occupational’ caste system and the Mughals and british just made it worse. Or the caste system is ‘Spiritual’ class system.
–‘Aryan Invasion’ is phoney; actually it was ‘Out of India'(yes, the euro ‘aryans’ actually came from Bharat.)
( Another thing I read that during the critical years of the indian independence movement, the british indian military establishment was actually against independence.)
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