Empire of Violence (3) India

A revolt occurred in India in 1857. Some of the British Empire's actions are described in Legacy of Violence.

Large swathes of the region remained uncontrollable for over a year, and only suppression restored colonial order. British forces tied suspected Indian rebels to the mouths of canons, lit the fuse and blew them to pieces. They levelled villages and towns as their murderous campaigns against the local population spread (p.54).

When two local leaders were arrested in India in April 1919, mass protests occurred in Amritsar. British colonial troops opened fire and killed twenty-five people. Indian protesters retaliated by looting and burning shops and cutting telegraph and telephone wires and damaging railway tracks. When thousands of protesters gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, the British governor announced that all meetings and procession were forbidden. With two armored cars and fifty riflemen, he went to the park (with only one exit) where fifteen thousand unarmed civilians were gathered.

Without warning, he commanded his men to fire. Within ten minutes they discharged about 1650 rounds and left nearly four hundred dead. At least twelve hundred civilians lay wounded in the blood-soaked earth, where they remained as the soldiers retreated, making no attempt to assist those survived the massacre.

The violence was the start of several days of widespread British-led reprisals. With no recording of evidence and limited cross–examination, a martial law commission tried 852 suspects, convicted 581, sentenced to death 108, and sentenced to “transportation for life” or banishment to a remote penal facility, another 264. By the time massive public protest led to reintroduction of the right to appeal, eighteen men had already been publicly hanged.

Collective punishments unfolded through the region. Raj agents confiscated personal property for the troops, cut off electricity and water supplies, expelled students from schools via a quota system, and prevented peasants at gun point from harvesting their crops. Public floggings, a routine punishment in India, skyrocketed.

Raj forces flogged an entire wedding party for being part of an illegal gathering and throughout the region they physically and mentally coerced Indian eyewitnesses into giving false evidence that exonerate European repression.

Security forces compelled men and women to skip, touch their noses to the ground, and recite poetry; they literally whitewashed local peasants; and they made men undertake the work of untouchables, which according to the Hindu population considered a religious pollution… Security forces made persons who failed to salute lick their officers’ boots as punishment (p. 132).

This behaviour cannot be justified as by saying it was a different age. These events happened at the same time as the British government was introducing humanitarian social reforms in England. So they did know better.