David Cameron was right not to apologise - the monstrous massacre of Amritsar SAVED thousands of lives, says one of Britain's top historians

Brigadier Reginald Dyer ordered troops to fire on a crowd of 25,000 in Amritsar, Punjab, on April 13, 1919

British maintain 379 were killed - lower than the 1000 stated by India



Anti-British feeling was at its highest since the Indian Mutiny in 1857

A revolt in the Punjab would have led to tens of thousands of deaths



David Cameron, pictured at the Golden temple in Amritsar, described the killings as 'monstrous' but did not make a formal apology

It is 5.15pm on Sunday, April 13, 1919, in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in the Punjab. An open-topped motorcar pulls up near the Jallianwala Bagh, a seven-acre area of waste ground, and Brigadier Reginald ‘Rex’ Dyer steps out.



He then attempts to bring an armoured car, with its machine gun, into the area, but is foiled because the street is too narrow. No matter, he orders his force of Indian and Gurkha troops to open fire into a peaceful crowd of local men, women and children who are listening to Gandhian speeches about non-violence.



The shooting continues until the ammunition runs out and, in the words of the memorial there, the ground is ‘saturated with the blood of about 2,000 Indian patriots’. Then he calmly goes back to his headquarters, triumphantly successful in his premeditated plan to murder innocents in the name of the British Raj.



That is the popular view of the Amritsar Massacre, sedulously promoted by the 1982 movie Gandhi and the one taught in India and in British schools today.



It is the story of the vicious British Empire yet again killing thousands, out of what has been described as ‘imperial terrorism’. In 2005, in reviews of a biography of Dyer entitled The Butcher Of Amritsar, the massacre was variously described as ‘an unforgivable atrocity’, ‘state terrorism’, ‘a heinous crime’ and ‘the biggest and bloodiest blot on the generally benign record of British rule in India’.



Yet the true story of what happened that day in Amritsar is far more nuanced and David Cameron, at the end of his trip to India last week, was quite right not to make a formal apology for it, merely reiterating what Winston Churchill correctly said at the time, that it was ‘monstrous’. For everything stated in my opening paragraphs above is either completely wrong or was certainly not what it seemed.



In fact, according to a superb book called The Amritsar Massacre: The Untold Story Of One Fateful Day, by Nick Lloyd, a lecturer in defence studies at King’s College, London, which was published last year, it turns out that Dyer had no plans at all to commit a massacre, and that when he arrived he was expecting a much smaller crowd than the 25,000 who were present.



He panicked when he realised his force of 90 men – including 40 without rifles – were outnumbered by 275 to one. ‘I realised that my force was small and to hesitate might induce attack,’ he later explained. ‘I immediately opened fire and dispersed the crowd.’



Anti-British feeling was at its highest since the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Only days earlier, huge mobs had killed five Europeans and as Lloyd remarks of the attacks elsewhere in the Punjab: ‘Far from being peaceful crowds, many of the rioters were armed with lathis [metal-tipped sticks], bill hooks and various other weapons, including swords and kerosene oil, which was used to burn government buildings.’



Brutal: A painting of British soldiers shooting civilians in Amritsar on April 13, 1919

If a revolt had caught fire in the Punjab, it would have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Indians from all the main communities. As the half-million or so who died there during Partition in 1947-48 remind us, the Punjab was a sectarian tinderbox.



In that context, 379 deaths – the casualty figure always maintained by the British – might be monstrous, as the PM has rightly said, but it nipped in the bud something that could have been calamitous.

At that point, the British in Amritsar had only 75 armed and 100 unarmed constables with whom to control a city of 150,000 inhabitants.



'Distraught': Brigadier Reginald Dyer was in charge of British troops and ordered the massacre in Amritsar

Three days before the massacre, a mob had gone on a rampage in the city and three bank officials were lynched in their offices, their corpses burnt in the street. Two other officials were murdered, and an elderly female missionary, Miss Sherwood, was hauled off her bicycle, beaten to the ground and left for dead.



Posters appeared which alleged that the British raped Indian girls in Amritsar and urged Indians to ‘dishonour’ and ‘clear the country of all English ladies’.



Dyer feared that it might take little for ‘peaceful’ crowds such as the one in the Jallianwala Bagh – which was overwhelmingly made up of young men – to turn violent. Had Dyer premeditated a massacre, he would have brought more than 50 riflemen with him. Although the Jallianwala Bagh crowd had no firearms, many did have lathis and a concerted rush, which Dyer’s staff officer Captain Tommy Briggs feared might happen, could have spelt disaster.



Nor is it true that Dyer wanted to use a machine gun but could not get it into the Jallianwala Bagh, as the myth-makers still insist. In fact, there was a Vickers machine gun in the armoured car that he knew he could have simply detached from its stand, since it was designed for dismounted use.



Nor did Dyer use more than a fraction of the ammunition he brought with him: 1,650 rounds out of 9,000.



What makes Dyer’s over-reaction understandable was his often-repeated warnings throughout the morning of April 13 that no demonstration could take place in a city that was declared to be under martial law, and that ‘all gatherings will be fired upon’. This proclamation was made three times in Urdu and Punjabi – languages understood by 90 per cent of the city’s inhabitants – at no fewer than 19 places by Dyer and a detachment of Indian and British troops.



As they marched through the city, Dyer was spat upon by ‘bored, sullen and hostile’ groups of youths, who some of the troops felt were ‘so hostile that violence could have broken out at any moment’.



Having never been to the Jallianwala Bagh before, Dyer did not know that it was walled in on three sides by the backs of houses, with a low wall on the far side. His view was further impeded by the dust thrown up by the 25,000 people present. ‘Dyer came to me all dazed and shaken up,’ a British administrator later recalled of that evening, ‘and said, “I never knew there was no way out.” ’

Accepted version: The depiction of the mass killings at Amritsar in the 1982 Oscar-winning film Gandhi



Massacre: British soldiers opened fire on around 25,000 peaceful protestors close to the Golden Temple in Amritsar

Although Dyer later claimed to have undertaken the massacre to ‘save’ British India, Lloyd convincingly explains that he had had no such idea in his mind that fateful afternoon. As well as being ‘dazed and shaken up’ – hardly the response of a soldier who had had murder in his mind – all the witnesses recall how Dyer ‘was unnerved and deeply upset about what had happened’.



One witness described him as ‘distraught’, and he told a friend six months afterwards: ‘I haven’t had a night’s sleep since that happened. I keep on seeing it over again.’



Gunfire: A painting depicts the moment around 50 British riflemen fired 1,650 rounds into a crown of Indian protestors

The Indian estimates of the number of the dead are wildly exaggerated, although Lloyd believes that the number given by the Hunter Inquiry of 379 is probably too low by 35 or so. It was certainly not in the ‘thousands’, however. And despite the depictment in the movie Gandhi, there were very few women and children present.



A deputation of Indian merchants and shopkeepers soon after the massacre actually thanked Dyer for preventing looting, and he received many other such tokens of gratitude; the guardians of the Golden Temple invested him there as an honorary Sikh.



If one wants to find examples of large-scale killing going on in Amritsar in the 20th Century, one might also look at Indira Gandhi’s 1984 storming of the Golden Temple, in which as many as 1,000 died.



Because that was a massacre of Indians by Indians, it did not attain the condemnation that has attended Brigadier Dyer.



So whose fault was this undeniable tragedy? Ultimately, of course, Dyer must take the blame for giving the order to fire, but the organisers of the banned meeting must share some of it too. They knew how febrile the atmosphere was, and had heard Dyer’s order not to congregate.



Yet trusting in their non-violent saintliness, the Congress Party still called together a crowd of 25,000 people for a demonstration they knew to be extremely provocative.



They irresponsibly and, in the event, suicidally went ahead, putting propaganda and politics before people’s lives. Instead of being criticised for their recklessness, the organisers have been hailed as heroes, while Dyer has been demonised.

Commemoration: The Prime Minister lays a wreath at the memorial to the victims of the Amritsar massacre

Remorse: But Mr Cameron stopped short of apologising for Britain's role in the killings