Edwin Montagu

Edwin Montagu was Secretary of State for India who declared that British policy was the progressive realisation of responsible government there, and who destroyed his own career by attacking the Amritsar massacre. He was the son of a Jewish banker, the only practising Jew in the cabinet, and he had opposed the Balfour Declaration in 1917 on the grounds that declaring a national home for the Jews elsewhere would make British Jews foreigners in Britain - the single cabinet voice against it. His August 1917 declaration on India was the first statement that self-government was the object rather than an indefinite aspiration, and the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 gave Indian ministers control of some provincial departments under a system called dyarchy, which satisfied nobody. The same year the Rowlatt Acts extended wartime detention powers and General Dyer's troops fired on a penned crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing several hundred. Montagu forced the Hunter inquiry and condemned Dyer in the Commons in 1920 in a speech that was shouted down by his own side. The Lords voted in Dyer's favour. He resigned in 1922 after publishing an Indian government telegram about Turkey without cabinet approval, lost his seat, and died at forty-five. His speech against Dyer is the only occasion on which a British cabinet minister was shouted down by his own party for condemning a colonial massacre, and antisemitic abuse was part of what was shouted. Dyer was retired without further punishment and a public subscription raised him some twenty-six thousand pounds. The reforms Montagu's name is on were superseded within a decade by demands he had thought a generation away.

• Lived: 1879 CE – 1924 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: politician