Jallianwala Bagh - Why Indians fired on Indians
I
lived in Hong Kong for some years. One of the facts I observed was that Hong Kongers
by and large do not like Indians and many of them even hate us. Whether an Indian
goes on to look for a home or on the streets to buy groceries, the feeling is
palpable. Many Indians I talked to said they feel it rather strongly. I had asked
several people but got no satisfactory answer.
Finally,
I asked a local friend about the reason. He was a historian at one of Hong Kong’s
University. At first he tried to deny that this exists but then later said the roots
of it are historical. “Do you know,” he said, “the British came to Hong Kong in
1841 and when they tried to build the first police force with the help of locals,
they realized that the loyalty of the locals cannot be trusted to follow their orders
or shoot and kill if their fellow brethren revolted or were a rebellion. But they
realized they didn’t have the same experience in India. So they brought the
Indians. The first batch of Indians who came brutalized and tortured the people
here. The memory still lives in the mind of every person here and we haven’t forgiven
you for it and will never do,” he said in a deeply emotional voice. “You Indians
followed orders and didn’t show any mercy towards us which we expected you would
do.”
I
could only apologize to him and said it was an injustice. But what he had said left
me perturbed. In social sciences ‘the other’ is a term that denotes how human
beings divide, create walls with other groups whom they perceive as not similar
to them and even inferior. For the American ‘the other’ is everyone who is outside
America. For the British everyone who is not White and outside the country is ‘the
other’. For the man from Pakistan it has become the Indian. Same can be said of
the Chinese. But the curious thing for Indians is that for many an Indians ‘the
other’ is not an outsider but another Indian only with whom his deepest chasm lies.
He is someone whom we make into an enemy.
“You
Indians, you have done it with your own people, like in Jallianwala Bagh. That
is how the British controlled your nation for two centuries, isn’t it?” The
historian’s words have stayed with me since then.
In
one of his books, Amitav Ghosh, the author, writes that the British believed that
the Indians can always be relied upon to ruthlessly put down any one whether their
own in India or anywhere else on their orders, something they could never imagine
doing with anyone else. Would a Japanese be ever trusted to fire on its own
people on the orders of a foreign General? Would a Chinese army have done so
when asked? I believe the answer is a big no.
As
one ex-General from the former British Indian army said, “The British were masters
in making the Indian people believe that they were fighting on the side of the truth
and so when the Indians fought a fellow Indian they saw him as evil and felt little
or no guilt killing him.”
Is
that why even today we are deeply divided, can torture a fellow Indian and feel
little empathy, even shoot at him or beat him to death?
Why
did we Indians create ‘the other’ amongst each other and not outside like other
nations do?
Once,
a British historian, on the mention of Jallianwala Bagh, said that a British police
force or army would never shoot at its own people if asked to do so.
Why
did we Indians did it then? I believe it is worth finding an answer to this
dilemma.
Why
didn’t the police force refuse to follow Michael Dyer’s orders and not shoot at
their own people? This maybe is one of the most poignant and perplexing questions
in understanding why British could rule India.
Has
the notion of ‘the other’ as one we can hate and eliminate always existed amongst
us in our history and as one that the British only perfected when they came in contact
with us? I wish to ask this on the 100th anniversary of the tragedy of
Jallianwala Bagh if we as a society created a gap within that can cause fissures
and we can again be ordered into maniacal behavior on the orders of a white man
or woman.
Did
we carry our philosophy of ‘vasudeva kutumbakam’ too far and become like the subjects
in Milgram’s experiment?
Jallianwala
Bagh to me appears to be not the action of a deranged, crazy lunatic General but
of a psychopath who knew this weakness of Indians only too well, who understood
this mindset in us. He knew that when ordered to fire, the men wouldn’t stop because
the cries of their own country men would have no effect on them. This philosophy,
sick and dangerous, may need to be addressed and understood that may lead us to
kill each other or destroy. Will it ever lead us to become a united cohesive nation
and not hold us back?
Creating
‘the other’ and making him into an enemy is dehumanizing which has just not only
been symbolic, making us slaves but also making us lose what is the most
precious, our freedom. It delineated us from the power that rightfully belonged
to us as a nation.
Last
year we visited the Jallianwala Bagh. There were hundreds of people laughing, talking
and taking pictures. No single face looked solemn. Only some seemed curious looking
at the Well or the Bullet marks on the wall. Where does this detachment from
our history comes from?
Slavery
dehumanized us Indians. As we know from history, no group cedes its privileges
over others out of altruism but is forced to do so when the privileges they enjoy
begin to threaten their survival. Gandhi could never do that to the British.
Only once during the INA Trials and the Naval Revolt, it happened when the idea
of one Indian being separate from ‘the other’ got erased terrifying the British
into thinking it might bring their annihilation in India.
Will
the present generation erase this blot? In it perhaps lies the safety that will
make our future generations safe from the contradictions that pushed our ancestors
into slavery and annihilating each other.
Rajat
Mitra
Psychologist
and Author of ‘The Infidel Next Door’
