Jallianwala Bagh Massacre

Imperial Crime and Punishment j Imperial Crime and Punishment THE MASSACRE AT JALLIANWALA BAGH AND BRITISH JUDGMENT, 19 I 9-I 920 Helen Fein The University Press of Hawaii A Honolulu Copyright © 1977 by The University Press of Hawaii All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmit ted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Roger Eggers Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Fein, Helen, 1934- Imperial crime and punishment. A revision of the author's thesis, Columbia University, 1971. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Amritsar, India-Massacre, 1919. I. Title. DS480.5.F4 1977 954'.03'5 77-2930 ISBN 0-8248-0506-2 To my guides to Amritsar, Mrs. Bandhari, Professor Datta, and Mr. Sethi, who clung to truth and offered apples, chapati, and tea in friendship (ontents Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii Primary Source Notation xix I. Crime, Punishment, and Class Solidarity 2. The Massacres in Amritsar and Punjab Terror of 1919 20 3. Prologue to Collective Violence in India, 1858-1919 48 4. The Roots of the "Himalayan Miscalculation" during the Anti-Rowlatt Campaign of 1919 71 5. Assessing the Hypothesis 93 6. The Public Accounting 103 7. The Reasoning Why: Analysis of the Parliamentary Debates 129 8. Testing the Hypothesis through Content Analysis 153 9. The Roots and Resonance of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 168 Appendix A: Coding the Parliamentary Debates 191 Appendix B: The Circle of Trust 203 Appendix C: The Jamaica Debate 213 Notes 221 Bibliography 235 Index 243 Preface This book tries to explain how groups condone, legitimate, and authorize violence toward other groups which would be punished as criminal acts if committed against their own members. The origin of such violence is related to types of power structures that make such crimes more likely. Collective violence-which has also been called racial, reli gious, or communal violence-has reached epidemic scope in this century. If we believe that all groups should enjoy the same right to live, exercise civil rights, and maintain their own collective identity, violence victimizing any of them because of their iden tity must be regarded as a scourge. But despite its prevalence, there are few signs we have learned much about how it occurs or can be checked. Since the mass extermination of European Jewry during World War II, we have seen genocide or widespread massacre against distinct groups practiced without external check in southern Africa, Brazil, Burundi, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, northern Ireland, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Uganda. Doubtless, the list is incomplete. Social theorists, however, have not developed a coherent ex- x PREFACE planation of collective violence nor always discriminated it from mass political violence that may serve as a means of petition or sign of express grievances. Analysis of collective violence has been divided arbitrarily by disciplinary borders, regions in which cases occur, and topical contexts. Therefore, we have discrete case studies of communal violence in south Asia, American violence, internal war, colonial conflicts, violence related to tribal and national integration and to race relations, and war be tween nations. This book does not attempt to review or codify such analyses nor survey the writings of the nineteenth-century theorists who offered explanations of the genesis of group violence in class or group conflict. It draws upon but recasts deductions from one major theoretical line, conflict theory, with two seminal sources: Georg Simmel, interpreted by Lewis Coser, and Karl Marx, as revised by Ralf Dahrendorf. 1 Little systematic use of such propositions has been made, except Allen Grim shaw's use of Simmel in his classic study of American race riots. 2 What has been overlooked (or unstressed) by many conflict theorists (and other sociologists) is the essentially repressive nature of collective violence-the deliberate injury of any and sometimes all members of the tribe, race, or community accused of the crimes of one member, or some members. Or accused simply of being the other. "Racism" is sometimes casually in voked as an explanation, but few examine how and why people classify others as members of different races and whether such classification in itself is thought to imply their right to injure members of the other category. However, we know that groups of different characteristic physical types often live together peacefully and that people of the same hue frequently kill one another, discriminating the other by religious, ethnic, or cultural signs. One approach to understanding collective violence that has been neglected is to appreciate it as crime and punishment simultaneously: it is objectively a crime against the victims but is understood by its perpetrators as a punishment. The fact that pogroms, lynchings, and colonial massacres are crimes that have usually gone unpunished is so well known that to comment on it is to risk criticism for elaborating the commonplace. The class perpetrating the crime often claims the victims deserved this punishment for a criminal act alleged to have been committed by PREFACE xi one or more of them against the class of the perpetrators. Sometimes these punishments are frankly acknowledged by the aggressors to be reprisals or revenge. In other cases, such violence is frequently accounted for by perpetrators as acts of self-defense, and the blame is cast on the victim for provoking them. How are we to explain this? Shall we explain it simply by unmasking it as an ideological cover-up or an accounting device to evade legal sanctions by the perpetrators? Simply negating the truth-value of their claims may blind us from new discovery. Although many sociologists believe that tak ing the viewpoint of the actor whose behavior is to be explained is a useful method of discovery, for a sociologist to acknowledge that collective violence may be not only accounted for but in tended as punishment is to invite censure as a sympathizer with the oppressors. Identification with the oppressed thus may become an ideological blindfold preventing us from understan ding the significance of people's own accounts of their acts sim ply because we disapprove of them. How does understanding collective violence as acts of punish ment enable us to understand why they occur and reoccur? The theorist who best explained the functions of repressive punish ment for the community and the need for vengeance was Emile Durkheim. 3 Durkheim explained how repressive sanctions punishment designed deliberately to injure the offender-restored the unity of a community based on mechanical solidarity, likeness of role, belief, habit, and sentiment. An injury against one is an injury against all until it is expiated. This work extends Durkheim's theory on the relation of group solidarity to crime and punishment to show how a social order based on membership in racial, ethnic, religious, or national groups tends to produce class crimes and class solidarity. Each class is excluded from the universe of moral obligation of the other, so that offenses against the other are not recognized as crimes. Although crimes against members of the dominant class by members of the class dominated are understood by the domi nant class to be crimes against all of its members, they recognize no obligation toward the dominated class that impels them to punish their own crime toward the dominated. This theory, elaborated in Chapter 1, explores the paradoxes of the crime punishment-crime cycle and how it can be manipulated. xii PREFACE One advantage of such a generalizing line of analysis is that it can be extrapolated to explain diverse situations including war fare against civilian populations, internal war, communal con flicts in plural societies, and colonial violence. Seldom have students of warfare related the social license to kill foreign na tionals to the assumptions emergent in civil war. The essential assumption allowing people to kill is the same-the enemy must be defined as outside the universe of moral obligation. Just as the nation becomes the boundary of the universe of obligation in war, the class, race, or tribe becomes the boundary of the universe of obligation in collective conflicts within the state. To argue that such an explanation is plausible cannot prove or disprove it. One way to test it is to analyze the difference be tween those who condoned crimes toward a subordinated class and those who condemned them in a social order based on the collective domination of people of one nation and race by those of another. Colonialism offers an array of examples and English imperial history a choice of well-documented massacres. The massacre of April 13, 1919 at the Jallianwala Bagh gives us a unique opportunity to prove this assumption because of the subsequent debate it engendered. Jallianwala Bagh has resonated in the memory of Indians for over a half a century. By official estimate, 379 Indians attending an unlawfully convened but peaceful political rally were killed by the orders of Brig. Gen. Reginald E. Dyer: Indian contemporar ies alleged that there were 1,000 to 1,500 deaths, and a census counted over 500 victims. A. J. P. Taylor calls the massacre "the worst bloodshed since the Mutiny, and the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule."4 No event in modern British history occurring in the United Kingdom or its white colonies has compared to it in loss of lives as a conse quence of firing against civilians. The Peterloo massacre had claimed about 11 lives. Across the Atlantic, British soldiers pro voked into firing on Boston Commons had killed five men and were accused of deliberate massacre.

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