the hail of bullets by the bodies of the dead and wounded under which
he had found shelter, shot and killed O’Dwyer in London, his act satisfied
a widespread desire for revenge that had not altogether died down over
twenty years later.
The Congress began to organise relief work in the Punjab, and set
up its own enquiry committee to provide a second opinion to that of
the Hunter Commission. Jawaharlal, sent to the Punjab as part of the
Congress investigation team, clinically reported his findings in his
notebooks, allowing himself a moment of hope as he recorded the tale
of an infant who had been in open firing range throughout the massacre
at Jallianwalla Bagh but had miraculously survived unhurt. Details that
emerged of the Punjab under martial rule were not particularly palatable
to Indian opinion: torture, public floggings of Indians, the enforcing of
an order insisting that all ‘natives’ salaamall sahibs(a form of salute
specifically implying inferiority), and making all Indians crawl down a
lane where a white woman had been insulted (or assaulted, depending on
the version of the story). Jawaharlal’s notebook recorded dryly that the
‘crawling order’ did not require Indians to pass through the lane on their
hands and knees, as most people outside the Punjab had assumed, but to
crawl along it on their bellies.
During the enquiry, Jawaharlal had the opportunity to see much
of Gandhi. Gandhi’s conducting of the Congress enquiry, and his inter-
actions with the Hunter Committee, greatly impressed the young
Jawaharlal. Jawaharlal also sent his father summaries of the Hunter
Report. Motilal was shocked – he was unable to recognise any British good
intentions now. ‘My blood is boiling,’ he wrote to his son.^8 At the end of
1919, Jawaharlal found himself in a railway compartment with a group
of military men travelling from Amritsar to Delhi. The group turned out
to be General Dyer and his fellow officers. Dyer regaled the gathering,
including the inadvertent listener on the upper berth, with tales of martial
law and of Jallianwalla Bagh, and boasted that he had had the whole town
at his mercy and had thought of reducing it to ashes, but then took pity
on it.
On December 27, 1919, at the Amritsar Congress session, Motilal’s
presidential address was very critical of Lieutenant-Governor O’Dwyer.
The ‘Punjab wrongs’, as Gandhi was to describe the situation, had created
a new solidarity within the Congress. Jawaharlal was to describe Amritsar
as ‘the first Gandhi Congress’.^9 The Ali brothers, recently released from
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 39