The Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place 103 years back on April 13, 1919. Hundreds of people were covered in red on this day by indiscriminate firing by the colonial forces. The British claimed only about 300 people were killed, while the Congress Party said at least a thousand were murdered in cold blood.
The Massacre that took place on this day:
The British had imposed a draconian Martial Law, which banned public gatherings, but people were not made aware of it. So, thousands of people visited to celebrate the Baisakhi festival, which was on April 13 in the year 1919. The innocent people were shot on the orders of Colonel Reginald Dyer – the acting Brigadier, who asked his troops to shoot indiscriminately without asking the crowd to leave. The British soldiers were armed with two armoured cars and machine guns while the troops used Scinde rifles. The firing continued for 10 to 15 minutes and around 1,650 rounds of bullets were fired, leaving thousands of people dead. The site, where the incident took place was the Jallianwala bagh in Punjab’s Amritsar. This is embedded in our history as the “Amritsar Massacre”. The garden, which turned into a sea of dead, was enclosed on three sides since houses were built around it. The entire garden had no exit route apart from the main entrance. This made sure that no one could leave the spot when the shooting starts.
Rabindranath Tagore refused to accept Knighthood to protest the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Mahatma Gandhi, too, returned the ‘Kaiser-i-Hind’ award.
Udham Singh, a member of the revolutionist Ghadar party, shot Colonel Reginald Dyer on March 13, 1940. He had taken the revenge for the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.
The last known survivor of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, Shingara Singh, passed away on June 29, 2009, at the age of 113.
