David Cameron expressed regret yesterday
Indian media is asking for formal apology.
What actually happened?
It was the second worst massacre under British rule of unarmed civilians, worst being after the mutiny of 1857.
Less than a hundred Indian soldiers fired upon the civilians in the park. 350 were killed by firing, many others died in the stampede. 1650 rounds were fired.
To me the real villains in the piece were the Gorkhas and the Baluchi soldiers who fired. A single Englishman General Dyer asked them to fire into their own countrymen.
And they did as ordered.
If they wanted, they could have turned their guns against General Dyer instead. But they did not.
This is the strange history of British occupation throughout the 200 years. The Indians never rebelled except in 1857.
There is something seriously wrong with our people that they would kill their own countrymen if ordered by a foreign ruler.
I find nothing wrong with what Dyer did - three Britishers had been murdered, a British woman had been raped by the unruly mobs of Lahore and Amritsar. He did what was right for his country - he created a fear which helped another 20 years of rule.
He paid the price also - of losing his commission and losing his CBE for gallantry much earlier in his life during the Afghan wars.
The British were also very canny - they did not take the majority Sikh troops for firing at the crowd. They took Gurkhas from far away - who were loyal soldiers. They took Baluchi soldiers who had faithfully served against the Afghans in the wars and had personal loyalty to General Dyer.
I suppose one might say - Baluchis are from Pakistan. Gurkhas are from Nepal (Although Gurkhas are agitating for Gurkhaland in Darjeeling, where the refugees from Nepal have outnumbered the local people). But in those days, all were Indians, there was only one country ruled under one law administered by the British.
They could have said no - to a massacre of civilians. This is not like pushing a remote control firing button like a drone strike. This is shooting people, killing them - but continuing to shoot.
I also find it strange that earlier massacres by Afghan and Uzbek generals like Ahmed Shah Durrani who massacred 70-80000 Marathas, Akbar who massacred 100,000 men of Vikramaditya Hemu, the Massacre of entire population of Hampi etc are always ignored by the history text books. Those massacres were accompanied by individual cruelties of savage proportions like civilians being beheaded to create a mountain of skulls, women being mass raped and such horrors.
But one Jalianwala Bagh is remembered a hundred years later. It was the least of the massacres which have occurred in India.