Reginald Dyer

Colonel Reginald Dyer ordered the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar in April 1919, and did more than any single person to end Indian confidence in British rule. He was born in Murree in India, the son of a brewer, and spent almost his whole career in the Indian Army, including campaigns on the Persian and Afghan frontiers. In April 1919 the Punjab was in unrest over the Rowlatt Acts, which extended wartime detention powers into peacetime. Dyer was sent to Amritsar and banned public gatherings. On 13 April, the festival day of Baisakhi, several thousand people were in the Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed piece of ground with few exits; many were pilgrims who had not heard the order. Dyer marched in fifty riflemen, blocked the main entrance with his vehicles, and gave the order to fire without any warning to disperse. The shooting went on for about ten minutes, until the ammunition was nearly gone. The official count was 379 dead and over a thousand wounded; Indian estimates were far higher. He told the subsequent inquiry that he would have used a machine gun if the entrance had admitted his armoured cars, and that his purpose was to produce a moral effect throughout the Punjab. He was relieved of command and retired. The House of Commons censured him; the House of Lords did not, and a public subscription in Britain raised a large sum for him. Rabindranath Tagore renounced his knighthood in protest at the massacre. Gandhi, who had until then argued for cooperation with the Raj, moved to non-cooperation within a year, and dated his own loss of faith in British justice to the response rather than to the shooting. Dyer suffered a series of strokes and died in 1927.

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