THE BUTCHER OF AMRITSAR: General Reginald Dyer

From The London Times:

Amritsar_1 When the Queen visited India in 1997, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of independence, the Duke of Edinburgh put his foot in it in the customary way. Entering Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, he saw a plaque that stated, “This ground is hallowed with the mingled blood of about 2,000 innocent Hindus, Sikhs, and Mussulmans who were shot by British bullets on 13 April, 1919.” The duke suggested that the figure was an exaggeration. There were protests in Delhi by Sikh organisations and an official banquet was cancelled. Almost as inflammatory as the Amritsar massacre was Dyer’s insistence a few days later that Indians using a street where an Englishwoman had been assaulted would have to crawl down it. The local press saw the order as a racial insult, and Gandhi viewed it as more serious than the massacre itself.

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