THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND THE PARTITION OF INDIAin the British war effort. After this experience he was even more hurt by
the passing of the Rowlatt Acts and their plain message that India’s loyalty
was not respected by the British at all. The method of satyagraha which he
had adopted in South Africa seemed to be the right means for articulating
the Indian reaction to the Rowlatt Acts. In order to adjust the method to
Indian conditions, he called for a ‘hartal’—a closing of shops and stopping
of all business, on a certain day.
The economic conditions in India after the end of the war were rather
chaotic: prices had risen enormously in 1918, the urban population and the
rural poor were badly affected by this. More than two million Indians had
participated in the war abroad and most of them returned now as
demobilised soldiers. The situation in the Panjab was particularly tense in
this respect and the government there was quite nervous. For this reason
Gandhi was prohibited from entering this province, and was taken off the
train and forced to return to Bombay. This, however, did not improve the
situation in the Panjab; on the contrary, uncontrolled unrest flared up and
the British military authorities thought that they had to counter with a
show of force. General Dyer selected an unauthorised meeting in the
Jallianwalla Bagh of Amritsar for this purpose. This is a square surrounded
by walls which prevent a dispersal of a crowd, even if given due notice and
enough time. General Dyer in fact did not give the crowd much of a chance
to disperse and ordered his soldiers to fire several rounds until hundreds of
people were dead.
The ‘Massacre’, as it came to be known, conveyed a message quite the
reverse of what General Dyer had intended: this was not a show of force,
but of a nervousness which indicated the beginning of the end of the British
Indian empire. The British depended on the cooperation of the Indians for
the continuation of their rule and this was not the way to go about getting
it. A campaign of non-cooperation was a fitting answer to this fatal
mistake. Gandhi had outlined such a strategy of non-cooperation in his
manifesto, Hind Swaraj, as early as 1909 when he was in South Africa.
Nevertheless, he did not immediately embark on such a campaign. There
was a delayed reaction as the events in the Panjab were not yet fully
known and two commissions of inquiry were set up in order to discover
the facts. One commission was an official British body under the
chairmanship of Lord Hunter; the other was appointed by the National
Congress and Gandhi was one of its members.
In 1919 the session of the National Congress was held at Amritsar, the
site of the massacre, and presided over by Motilal Nehru, the father of
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The tone of the resolutions
was rather moderate and the radical turn which the Congress and Gandhi
would take a few months later could not have been predicted from these
proceedings. Gandhi and Jinnah even co-sponsored a resolution thanking
Montagu for the constitutional reforms. Gandhi supported this resolution