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The Amritsar Massacre and the

minimum force debate
a
Nick Lloyd
a
Defence Studies Department , King's College London at the Joint
Services Command and Staff College, Defence Academy of the UK
Published online: 21 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Nick Lloyd (2010) The Amritsar Massacre and the minimum force debate, Small
Wars & Insurgencies, 21:2, 382-403, DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2010.481436

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 Small Wars & Insurgencies
Vol. 21, No. 2, June 2010, 382–403

The Amritsar Massacre and the minimum force debate

Nick Lloyd*

Defence Studies Department, King’s College London at the Joint Services Command and
Staff College, Defence Academy of the UK
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This article re-examines one of the most infamous incidents in British

imperial history: the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, and analyses it within the
context of the British Army’s minimum force philosophy. The massacre has
long been regarded as the most catastrophic failure of minimum force in the
history of the British Army. This article reconsiders the arguments over the
shooting at Amritsar and the role of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, and
questions the accepted view that the massacre was such a failure of minimum
force. It argues that the circumstances surrounding the massacre must be
understood before judging the incident and given these factors it is possible
to see it within a minimum force framework.
Keywords: Amritsar; minimum force; aid to the civil power; Indian Army;
Jallianwala Bagh

At approximately 5.10 p.m. on 13 April 1919, Brigadier-General ‘Rex’ Dyer led

a small party of Indian soldiers through the centre of Amritsar into a piece of
waste ground known as the Jallianwala Bagh.1 He had had been informed that an
illegal political gathering was taking place and had come to disperse it.2 The
Bagh was a rectangular space about six or seven acres in size, bordered by high
walls and the backs of houses. Dyer’s party consisted of 25 Baluchis and
25 Gurkhas armed with rifles, and 40 Gurkhas armed only with kukris. They were
vastly outnumbered by the crowd that had gathered there. Perhaps as many as
20,000 people were being addressed by a speaker standing on a small patch of
raised ground, about 100 yards from where Dyer stood. Dyer’s men took up
positions and, as soon as they were in place, he ordered them to fire. This
continued for approximately six to ten minutes until the crowd had dispersed. The
ceasefire was then given and Dyer’s party left. They had fired approximately
1,650 rounds into the crowd, causing – according to official Government of India
figures – 379 deaths and over 1,000 wounded.3
The Amritsar Massacre is perhaps the most infamous single incident within
the history of the British Empire in India, an unprecedented collision between
nationalist protestors and the authorities which remains shrouded in controversy.4

*Email: nick.lloyd@kcl.ac.uk

ISSN 0959-2318 print/ISSN 1743-9558 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09592318.2010.481436
http://www.informaworld.com
 Small Wars & Insurgencies 383
In his seminal book, Imperial Policing (1934), Sir Charles Gwynn stated that
‘Few incidents connected with the employment of troops to restore order have
given rise to so much bitter controversy or have left such a lasting impression as
General Dyer’s action at Amritsar.’5 The situation that Dyer faced at Amritsar
was undoubtedly difficult. March and April 1919 were months of acute tension
and rising political unrest in India as new government legislation, the so-called
Rowlatt Act, came into force. The Rowlatt Act was intended to allow for the
continuation of emergency wartime powers of detention against suspected
‘revolutionary terrorists’, but was deeply unpopular and widely misunderstood.6
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The Act became a cause célèbre with many Indian politicians arguing that it was
provocative and flew in the face of British promises of representative government
and greater freedoms. It attracted universal Indian opposition in the Imperial
Legislative Council and so infuriated the social campaigner, Mohandas (also
known as Mahatma) Gandhi, that he resolved to start a non-violent campaign in
protest against the legislation. The so-called Rowlatt satyagraha – Gandhi’s
word for ‘truth’ or ‘love force’ – attracted patchy support throughout the
subcontinent, but was particularly strong in and around Bombay and in the
Punjab.7 Unfortunately, Gandhi’s campaign of protest meetings and strikes
(known as hartals) did not remain peaceful and violence broke out, first in Delhi
on 30 March, and then in the Bombay Presidency and the Punjab on 10 April.
The violence was worst in Amritsar. In response to the arrest and deportation
of two local nationalist leaders, huge crowds had gathered to protest and demand
their release. When these crowds attempted to move north out of the city and
enter the European settlement (the civil lines), the police and army were forced to
stop them, causing around 20 or 30 casualties in two separate incidents of firing.
Enraged and out for revenge, elements of the crowds then turned back into
Amritsar, armed themselves with thick bamboo staves (lathis) and kerosene oil,
and stormed through the streets burning buildings and murdering every European
they could find. In the violence that followed five Europeans were killed, several
more were seriously assaulted and various European-owned buildings, including
two banks, were ransacked and set on fire. For the official British community in
Amritsar, the murders on 10 April were horrifying and shocking, ripping apart the
trust and relationships that had been cultivated in the city for many years. Miles
Irving, the Deputy Commissioner, believed that the situation they were faced
with was quite simply, ‘the greatest calamity since the mutiny’.8 Irving believed,
as did many others, that Dyer’s action in the Jallianwala Bagh had ‘saved’ India
from a repeat of the horrors of 1857.
Most writers have never agreed that the massacre prevented further
bloodshed and violence from taking place. The Indian National Congress called it
‘a calculated piece of inhumanity towards utterly innocent and unarmed men,
including children . . . unparalleled for its ferocity in the history of modern British
administration’.9 It had a profound effect on the future of the Raj, alienating vast
swathes of the Indian population and ushering in a crisis of catastrophic
proportions for the then Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, a man who
 384 N. Lloyd
had wanted his time at the India Office to be marked by a new flowering of
Indo-British relations and who was anxious to conciliate so-called ‘moderate’
Indian politicians. The massacre occurred barely seven months before the
Government of India Act of 1919 would come into force, a set of reforms that
would fundamentally alter the way that the Raj was governed, conceding
increased amounts of responsibility and authority to Indians and significantly
loosening the control that the Government of India exercised over the provinces
of India.10 But by the time the Act came into force, any hopes that it would rally
‘moderate’ opinion behind the Raj and consolidate British control had been
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ruined in the political storm over Amritsar that lashed the subcontinent and
caused a major scandal in the United Kingdom. The controversy over the incident
has never abated and it is still used today to criticise the British legacy in India.
There have been many accounts of the Amritsar Massacre, but relatively few
have discussed it within the wider context of the British approach to
counterinsurgency and low-intensity conflict, particularly the extent to which
the British Army employed violence and military force in such circumstances.11
It has been widely held that the British generally operated within the law when
conducting counterinsurgency and were far less likely to engage in the kind of
brutality and violence that characterised similar operations by the Americans or
other European powers. According to this view, the British were uniquely
capable of conducting ‘softer’ operations, which emphasised ‘hearts and minds’,
deterrence, and the application of ‘minimum force’.12 Although a number of
writers have challenged this view, arguing that in certain circumstances the
British could be as brutal as anybody else, such violence seems to have been
individual exceptions rather than part of any official policy.13 As Matthew
Hughes has recently written (when analysing the suppression of the Arab Revolt
between 1936 and 1939), the British were ‘relatively speaking, humane and
restrained – the awfulness was less awful – when compared to the methods used
by other colonial and neo-colonial powers operating in similar circumstances’.14
The Amritsar Massacre was, of course, the great exception to this narrative, and
in terms of the numbers of dead and wounded it ranks with some of the worst
examples of brutality towards civilian populations in modern history including
the My Lai Massacre, Bloody Sunday, and Tiananmen Square.
There has been a great deal of speculation about why Dyer fired into the
crowd and whether he was justified or not. Although some writers, notably Dyer’s
biographer, Ian Colvin, and a fellow supporter, Arthur Swinson, have attempted
to defend him and argue that his actions were justified and necessary,15 most
accounts disagree, stressing both the extreme violence of Dyer’s actions and the
innocent nature of the crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh.16 The motives attributed to
Dyer’s actions have been much debated, but it has generally been accepted that
Dyer had decided upon his actions before he reached the Bagh and that they were
a gross exception to the approach that the British Army usually took in such
situations. For the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, the Jallianwala
Bagh was an episode ‘without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the
 Small Wars & Insurgencies 385
British Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those
tragic occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with
the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event
which stands in singular and sinister isolation.’17 The massacre was a clear
exception to the British Army’s much-vaunted minimum force philosophy that
had traditionally guided its approach to these matters. According to Helen Fein,
‘Dyer’s firing not only violated but contradicted the minimum force principle’.18
The claim that the Amritsar massacre violated Britain’s minimum force
philosophy has become accepted historical opinion. Most recently, Simeon Shoul
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has argued that the massacre was ‘the worst violation of the British Army’s riot
control doctrine’.19 Indeed, given the unprecedented scale of the casualties in the
Jallianwala Bagh, this would seem, at least on first glance, to be self-evident.
Nevertheless, simply accepting that this was the case is problematic because, as
will be seen, the circumstances of the firing in the Jallianwala Bagh were
considerably different to the other incidents when police and soldiers fired into
crowds in March and April 1919, something that has only rarely been
appreciated. Furthermore, Dyer and his defenders justified the actions he had
taken in the Jallianwala Bagh on the grounds of minimum force, and these claims
deserve more than the cursory examination they have received. Although Dyer’s
defence was flawed, this had more to do with how he had justified what he had
done after the shooting, rather than his actions per se.
This article will review the massacre in the context of minimum force,
revisiting the arguments over the justifications for the shooting and analysing the
tenets and guidelines for minimum force as it then stood. It joins a growing body
of scholarly research that questions long-held assumptions about the nature of the
minimum force philosophy and the degree to which the British Army employed it
when giving aid to the civil power. Its conclusions are, however, radically
different from much of this literature. It claims that it is possible to see the
Jallianwala Bagh massacre as not necessarily such a failure of minimum force
(as has been commonly assumed), not only because the circumstances of this
incident were more complex than is often realised, but also because the definition
of minimum force was something of a grey area, allowing the British Army
considerable room to manoeuvre.

The minimum force philosophy

For many years, at least from the early nineteenth century, the British Army has
followed a number of principles when dealing with civil disorders, riots, and
rebellions, most notably that of minimum force.20 This was deeply rooted within
English Common Law and the values that were held by Victorian Britain, a
reflection of the evangelical Protestant ethos of the United Kingdom and a
growing emphasis on individuality and individual liberty. It was simply not
acceptable to use massive amounts of force to run an Empire, which might
alienate important local interest groups and damage the credibility of the
 386 N. Lloyd
authorities in any future disorder.21 When the army was called in to provide aid to
the civil power in times of trouble, its actions were governed by three main
principles: the importance of deterrence, the minimum use of force, and civil –
military cooperation. Troops were to be employed as a ‘presence’ or show of
force, where it was felt that they bolstered the morale of the police force and
provided an important element of deterrence. When facing riotous crowds or
mobs, the authorities would initially confront them with police and local officials,
with a magistrate warning them to disperse. If this failed, police would then be
empowered to charge the offenders, using truncheons (or in the case of India,
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lathis) to enforce dispersal, and if the situation warranted it, buckshot. If this did
not restore normality, the military could be brought up and, under certain
circumstances, ordered to fire into the crowd, usually two or four men firing single
shots.22 When force had to be employed against rioters or unlawful assemblies, no
more force should be used than was necessary, although how much would depend
on those officers tasked with this responsibility. Military law did, however, make
it clear that excessive force would be considered a criminal act.23
For Dyer, these guidelines had been set down in the 1914 edition of the
Manual of Military Law. This explained that gatherings could be split into three
types: unlawful assemblies, riots, and insurrections. An unlawful assembly was
‘any meeting whatsoever of great numbers of people with such circumstances of
terror as cannot but endanger the public peace and raise fears and jealousies
among the King’s subjects’. A riot was ‘a tumultuous disturbance of the peace by
three or more persons assembling together of their own authority with an intent
mutually to assist one another against any who oppose them, in the execution of
some enterprise of a private nature’. An insurrection was defined as something
more sinister, because while a riot was of some private nature, an insurrection
‘savours of high treason, and contemplates some enterprise of a general and
public nature’.24 The manual declared that an unlawful assembly may be
dispersed, but admitted that the amount of force to be used in doing this was ‘a
grave practical difficulty’. It merely stated that:
If resort be had to force, the principle is that so much force only is to be used as is
sufficient to effect the object in view, namely, the dispersion of the assembly; and if
injury results to any person from the use of that force, the question to be tried is
whether the means used were or were not more violent that the occasion required.25
Regarding riots, the law was clearer. The manual stated that every magistrate,
sheriff, or officer present must ‘do all that in him lies for the suppression of a riot’.
The Riot Act would be read to the rioters and then after one hour had passed, and
if they were still present, then ‘considerable force may, if necessary, be used for
the purpose of dispersing the mob’. However, the manual did state that ‘deadly
weapons ought not to be employed against the rioters, unless they are armed, or
are in a position to inflict grievous injury on the persons endeavouring to disperse
them, or are committing, or on the point of committing, some felonious outrage,
which can only be stopped by armed force’. What to do when faced with an
 Small Wars & Insurgencies 387
insurrection was a more difficult problem, but one that justified a greater degree
of force. The manual concluded that the existence of an ‘armed insurrection
would justify the use of any degree of force necessary effectually to meet and
cope with the insurrection’.26
How did Dyer explain his actions? In a report filed on 25 August 1919, Dyer
explained the situation that he had faced in Amritsar and justified the actions he
had taken. He had arrived in Amritsar on 11 April, when the British had
withdrawn all the remaining Europeans from the city and were nervously holding
the bridges over the railway station (which lay between the European settlement
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and the old city). Dyer considered things to be ‘in a very critical state’. There had
been several murders and assaults, rail lines and telegraph wires had been cut, and
he was aware of rumours spreading through the surrounding area that the British
Raj ‘was at an end’. During the night Dyer reorganised the troops under his
command and on the morning of 12 April led an armed column through the
streets, making a number of arrests. He complained that the bearing of the
inhabitants was ‘most insolent and many spat on the ground as we passed’. He
dispersed a mob at one of the gates to the old city (the Sultanwind Gate) but did
not employ any force to do so.27 The following morning, after another uneasy
night when more rumours circulating, this time that villagers were coming into
the city to kill and plunder, and a nearby Mission Hospital had been attacked, he
again led his troops through the city, reading a proclamation banning all
meetings.28 Unfortunately, upon returning to his headquarters outside the city, he
was informed (at 4 p.m.) that a ‘big meeting’ would be held in the Jallianwala
Bagh later that afternoon. As soon as he could, Dyer collected his troops and
marched to the scene of the meeting. He entered the Bagh through its narrow
entrance, deployed his men to the right and left, and then opened fire on the
crowd. ‘The responsibility was very great’, Dyer’s report stated. ‘If I fired I must
fire with good effect, a small amount of firing would be a criminal act of folly.’
Furthermore:
I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed and I consider this the
least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral, and widespread
effect it was my duty to produce, if I was to justify my action. If more troops
had been at hand the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no
longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd; but one of producing a sufficient
moral effect, from a military point of view, not only on those who were present but
more specially throughout the Punjab. There could be no question of undue
severity.29
Dyer’s motives were further elaborated on during the official Government of
India inquiry into the disorders. Anxious to atone for the incident and support so-
called ‘moderate’ Indians (who would be required to work with the forthcoming
reforms), Montagu established a committee of inquiry, the Hunter Committee, to
examine the causes of the disorders and the ways in which they had been dealt
with. Dyer was called before the committee on 19 November and spent the day
answering questions on what he had done. In a fractious courthouse, full of local
 388 N. Lloyd
students, and under sometimes hostile cross-examination, Dyer repeated many of
the points he had made in his August report, but at times went further, elaborating
on the penal nature of his actions. He maintained that the firing in the Jallianwala
Bagh was about punishment and was intended to spread word that order had been
restored. He believed that he was faced with not just an uprising in Amritsar, but
one throughout the Punjab, and that strong measures were justified. ‘I thought
they were trying to isolate me and my forces’, he argued. ‘Every thing pointed to
the fact that there was a widespread movement, and that it was not confined to
Amritsar alone. I looked upon these men as rebels who were trying to isolate my
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forces and cut me off from other supplies. Therefore I considered it my duty to
fire on them and to fire well.’ Dyer maintained that he had not taken his actions
lightly and that it was ‘a horrible duty for me to perform’.
It was a merciful act that I had given them chance to disperse. The responsibility
was very great. I had made up my mind that if I fired I must fire well and strong so
that it would have a full effect. I had decided if I fired one round I must shoot a lot of
rounds or I must not shoot at all.
‘My idea from the military point of view was to make a wide impression’, he
would later add. ‘I thought it would be doing a jolly lot of good and they would
realise that they were not to be wicked.’30
Dyer’s testimony before the Hunter Inquiry would prove to be his undoing.
The Hunter Report was published in March 1920. Montagu’s hopes that the
committee would ‘clear the air’ and restore faith in the Government of India were
to be dashed. Far from healing Indian wounds and soothing nationalist outrage,
the Hunter Committee was unable to come to a unanimous position on the
disturbances. The three Indian members of the committee broke away to write
their own Minority Report, which was much more critical of the Government of
India. It took a stronger line on a number of incidents, particularly the firing in the
Jallianwala Bagh, and the punishments that had been passed during martial law,
most notoriously Dyer’s infamous ‘crawling order’.31 Nevertheless, the Majority
Report was no official whitewash. It criticised Dyer on two counts: firstly that he
had not given the crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh a warning before opening fire,
and that he had continued to fire into them after they had started to flee.32
Regarding Dyer’s claim that it was his duty to produce ‘a sufficient moral effect’
throughout the Punjab, the Hunter Report concluded that this was ‘unfortunately
a mistaken conception of his duty’. Then, restating the basic principles of
minimum force, the report concluded that:
If necessary a crowd that has assembled contrary to a proclamation issued to prevent
or terminate disorder may have to be fired upon; but continued firing upon that
crowd cannot be justified because of the effect such firing may have upon people in
other places. The employment of excessive measures is as likely as not to produce
the opposite result to that desired.
The Government of India would later accept the findings of the Majority Report
and echo the criticisms it had made of Dyer, accusing him of making a ‘grave
 Small Wars & Insurgencies 389
error’ in the Jallianwala Bagh because of a ‘mistaken conception of his duty’.33
Dyer was informed that owing to the conclusions of the Hunter Committee he
could no longer expect any further employment in India. His career was over.

The case against Dyer

Dyer was not finished, however. Under a storm of criticism and facing the
imminent demise of his career, he tried desperately to argue his case. On 3 July
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1920 he sent a detailed letter on his actions to the Army Council, hoping that it
would be enough to convince them not to rely on the findings of the Hunter
Committee, but to conduct their own investigation and, if necessary, court martial
him. Dyer fervently believed that the inquiry had been flawed from the outset and
asked to be judged by his fellow officers in a military setting. The letter had been
written in consultation with a firm of solicitors in London, and presented a more
methodical and sophisticated case than had emerged from his rather ragged
performance before the Hunter Inquiry, and went into more detail about his
understanding of minimum force. He directly challenged the criticisms that had
been made of him, arguing that his actions had been justified given the grave
situation in Amritsar, and that, contrary to what had been written, he had
employed minimum force when dispersing the crowd.
I am well acquainted with this principle, and have at times fully accepted it.
Quite apart from the ordinary experience of an officer of my seniority and length
of service in the Indian Army, I had special occasion and opportunity to study
principles in this connection, as for five years I held the staff appointment of
Deputy-Assistant Adjutant-General for instruction in military law . . . I had this
principle very clearly before me during the whole time I was in Amritsar, and I
never at any time failed to act up to it to the best of my judgment and
capacity.34
How could Dyer claim that he had used minimum force? He stated that what he
was faced with at Amritsar was not just a riot, but an ‘open rebellion’ that justified
such a use of force. Consequently, he maintained that it was his duty not only to
disperse the crowd in the Bagh, but also to consider the wider picture and do
something that would restore order more generally throughout the Punjab. He
claimed that simply getting the crowd in the Bagh to move off from where it was
would not have restored order. It would have merely prolonged the revolt and,
therefore, if he was serious in trying to secure the ‘wider object’, he must strike
hard and do something that would shatter the cohesion of the rebels, news of
which would seep out into the surrounding hinterland and provide proof that the
authorities were back in control.35
Dyer’s explanation for his actions has never been accepted as a good enough
justification for firing without warning and continuing to do so for six to ten
minutes. Speaking in the House of Commons on 8 July 1920, Winston Churchill
discussed the Amritsar affair in some detail and made it clear that he regarded it
as flouting the principle of minimum force.
 390 N. Lloyd
I mean the doctrine that no more force should be used than is necessary to secure
compliance with the law. There is also a fourth consideration by which an officer
should be guided. He should confine himself to a limited and definite objective, that
is to say to preventing a crowd doing something which they ought not to do, or to
compelling them to do something which they ought to do.
Churchill believed that British officers had to bear in mind these rules on how to
conduct themselves, and remarked that there was ‘one general prohibition which
we can make’, of inflicting ‘frightfulness’ or a ‘great slaughter or massacre upon
a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest
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of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country’. He maintained that the
crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh had been unarmed (apart from having lathis), that
it had tried to escape when fire was opened, and that the shooting only ceased
when Dyer’s ammunition was nearly exhausted. ‘We have to make it absolutely
clear, some way or other’ he added, ‘that this is not the British way of doing
business.’36 Sir George Barrow, a senior British Army officer who served on the
Hunter Committee, echoed these sentiments. He regarded Dyer’s actions as being
tragic and unsound, stating that ‘Dyer acted contrary to the spirit of English law
which enjoins that no more force is used than is absolutely necessary to induce a
riotous or rebellious assembly to disperse’.37
The debate was still continuing years later. Writing in 1934, Sir Charles
Gwynn asked three questions of the massacre: was Dyer justified in opening fire
without giving warning to the crowd; was he justified in continuing to fire when
the crowd was attempting to disperse; and were Dyer’s motives a legitimate
defence for his actions? Of the first question Gwynn concluded that Dyer was not
justified:
Fire without specific warning is only justified when the mob is actively endangering
life or property. Even when actively defying authority . . . they should if possible be
warned before fire is opened.
On the second question Gwynn was also convinced that Dyer was again not
justified in acting as he did.
Clearly prolonged firing violated the principle that the minimum amount of force
only should be used.
On the final question Gwynn was even more emphatic, making it clear that if the
object of Dyer’s actions was to strike terror into the Punjab or make a wide
impression, then they were completely unacceptable.
His business was to deal with the situation of which he had been placed in charge.
It would produce an impossible state of affairs if every subordinate office adopted
a similar attitude. The ground would be cut from under the feet of higher authority
and any consistent policy would be out of the question . . . If exceptionally drastic
action is necessary to produce a widespread impression, then higher authority must
order it.38
Such views have been repeated ever since. Because Dyer had considered himself
to making a ‘widespread impression’ and fired not simply to make the crowd
 Small Wars & Insurgencies 391
before him disperse, but to make a point and to spread terror, this was clearly
inconsistent with the principles of minimum force, and its limited aim of getting
the crowd to disperse.
Nigel Collett, author of a recent biography of Dyer, has continued this theme,
arguing that Dyer’s claim to have acted with minimum force was flawed for a
number of reasons, primarily because the Hunter Committee was not convinced
that there was a planned rebellion in the Punjab in 1919. Dyer’s claim that the
meeting in the Jallianwala Bagh was part of an armed insurrection and that ‘any
degree of force’ could be employed to deal with it, was, therefore, unjustified. He
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was censured for three main reasons: first of all, that he fired without warning;
secondly, that he fired upon a crowd that was not engaging in violence, was not
threatening him, and had not given any indication that it would not have
dispersed; and thirdly, that he fired for longer than was necessary to disperse the
crowd.39 Collett argues that Dyer’s report on August 1919 is the best guide to his
motives in the Jallianwala Bagh; it is this report that ‘is able to explain
convincingly why he fired without warning and then went on firing continuously
for over ten to fifteen minutes’. This report shows that Dyer intended to fire into
the crowd and did so because he believed that he was faced with a challenge in
the Jallianwala Bagh that he could not shirk, not necessarily because he was
callous, but because he believed the Raj to be in danger and would do anything to
protect it.40 And it was these motivations that went above and beyond the
guidelines for minimum force, and why so few subsequent writers have been able
to defend his actions on these grounds.

Rethinking the Jallianwala Bagh

It is unlikely that the consensus on the Jallianwala Bagh as a failure of minimum
force will ever be unseated, particularly given Dyer’s testimony before the
Hunter Inquiry, which has gone down in nationalist legend. There are, however,
good grounds for challenging the views of Nigel Collett and others that the
Jallianwala Bagh was a failure of minimum force par excellence. Part of this is
to do with the problems related to the rules governing minimum force and the
considerable degree of room that it gave to officers providing aid to the civil
power, and secondly the unique circumstances of the Jallianwala Bagh, which
have often been discounted. Another problem with the existing consensus is that
it has confused the findings of the Hunter Committee on whether there was a
rebellion in the Punjab or not. The Hunter Report concluded that there was no
evidence for a pre-planned conspiracy behind the disorders in India and,
therefore, that the gathering in the Jallianwala Bagh should have been classed as
an unlawful assembly.41 Yet, somewhat confusingly, the Hunter Committee also
maintained that there had been a state of ‘open rebellion’ in the Punjab in mid-
April 1919, which would, according to army doctrine, justify ‘the use of any
degree of force necessary effectually to meet and cope with the insurrection’.42
This may, or may not, have come from a premeditated group of conspirators, but
 392 N. Lloyd
it nevertheless presented the authorities with a highly dangerous and
unpredictable situation. Therefore, Dyer’s argument that the gathering in the
Jallianwala Bagh was part of an insurrection cannot be easily dismissed (as
Collett and others have done). The crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh will be
discussed later, but in any case, what may have been clear to the committee in
October and November 1919 was surely not as obvious to Dyer in the
claustrophobic streets of Amritsar that April. Most of the other senior civilian and
military officials in the Punjab, ranging from the Deputy Commissioner of
Amritsar (Miles Irving), the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab (Sir Michael
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O’Dwyer), and the Adjutant-General (Havelock Hudson), all believed that what
happened in 1919 was a nationalist rebellion designed to overthrow British rule,
and that decisive measures were justified.43
Our knowledge of the gathering in the Jallianwala Bagh is remarkably thin,
and this has contributed to the confusion about what kind of people went to the
Bagh and whether it was hostile or peaceful. Dyer and his defenders always
maintained that the crowd that had gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh was of a
revolutionary nature and could have gone on from the Bagh to commit further
bloodshed and violence.44 Others have seen it as a peaceful political meeting that
contained many people who had come into Amritsar for a religious festival or
cattle fair, and were, therefore, unaware of Dyer’s orders banning meetings.45
There is no evidence that the crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh had access to
firearms, but it does seem that many of those present came with bamboo staves.
Indeed, there is sufficient evidence to maintain that the crowd was in a position to
inflict ‘grievous injury’ on Dyer’s men if they so desired, which would justify the
use of deadly force. Lathis had been much in evidence on 10 April and could be
lethal in the wrong hands.46 Ian Colvin, Dyer’s biographer, notes ‘how dangerous
a weapon that bludgeon might be, and would be, in the hands of infuriated men at
close quarters’.47 The mobs on 10 April had no access to firearms, but they had
still managed to burn buildings and murder five Europeans. The absence of
firearms does not necessarily mean that it was a peaceful gathering or that it was
not dangerous given the circumstances existing in the Punjab in April 1919.
It may not be possible to settle the arguments over the crowd in the
Jallianwala Bagh with the evidence that is available (and a crowd is inherently an
unstable and nebulous gathering), but from Dyer’s point of view he had done as
much as he could by going into the city reading his proclamation banning
meetings, and it seemed clear that the gathering was a show of defiance to his
orders. The meeting was, at the very least, an unlawful assembly but, given the
information then available to Dyer (and the rumours circulating about the
violence and arson in other districts), he had good grounds to believe that he was
faced with something more sinister. The meeting in Jallianwala Bagh cannot be
seen in isolation, and was part of Gandhi’s satyagraha campaign that had spread
throughout the Punjab and resulted in numerous collisions between police and
protestors since 30 March. There had been a major riot at Amritsar on 10 April, so
Dyer could not have been sure what would happen after this meeting had taken
 Small Wars & Insurgencies 393
place, and there was some chance that further bloodshed would result. In any
case, he was not responsible solely for what happened in the Jallianwala Bagh, or
indeed just for Amritsar. The oft-repeated charge (claimed by Gwynn and others)
that Dyer should simply have concerned himself with dispersing the crowd in the
Jallianwala Bagh and not taken a wider view, misses the point that, in this case,
Dyer was the ‘higher authority’.48 He was not just in charge of Amritsar. As
commander of the Jullunder Brigade, he was in charge of security over several
thousand square miles of severely disturbed countryside, meaning that it was his
duty to consider what was happening elsewhere.49
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When Dyer heard about the proposed meeting at the Jallianwala Bagh is of
crucial importance, because it seems that he had far less time to consider his
actions than is usually assumed. Dyer stated that it was at 12.40 p.m., while he
was still in the city, that he was given word that a meeting was scheduled to be
held at the Jallianwala Bagh later that afternoon. He returned to his headquarters
outside the city walls, arriving there about 1.30 p.m.50 However, Dyer does not
seem to have seriously considered that the meeting would actually take place
given his proclamation; it was he believed, merely a bluff, intending to scare him.
‘I thought I had done enough to make the crowd not meet,’ he would later tell the
Hunter Committee. At 4 p.m. Mr John Rehill, the Deputy Superintendent of
Police, saw Dyer. He told him that the meeting was definitely going ahead and
that 1,000 people had already gathered.51 It was at this point that Dyer acted.
Barely 15 minutes later his striking force had assembled and was beginning its
march to the Bagh, which took about an hour. Dyer’s knowledge of what lay
ahead of him was patchy at best. He had to be led to the Bagh by a guide because
he was unsure of the route.
As soon as Dyer’s column reached the street outside the Bagh, the general got
out of his car and walked into the garden. His Baluchi and Gurkha troops
followed him and within 30 seconds of entering they opened fire. The speed with
which Dyer opened fire has always been regarded by historians as proof that he
had planned to shoot at the crowd before he had reached the Bagh; that he was, in
the words of V.N. Datta, ‘bent from the outset on the drastic step he took’.52
However, this is entirely dependent upon what Dyer said and should be
considered critically because he had not originally explained his actions in this
way. In Dyer’s first report on the incident at the Jallianwala Bagh, written four
months before his much larger report of August, Dyer explained the firing as
follows:
I realised that my force was small and to hesitate might induce attack. I immediately
opened fire and dispersed the crowd.53
This was, of course, completely different to firing upon a crowd for the ‘moral’
effect it would have on the province. Had he stuck to his first explanation, it is
likely that Dyer would have had more supporters, and even Nigel Collett argues
that Dyer was censured, not so much for his actions, but for how he explained
them.54 Indeed, the fact that Dyer opened fire as soon as his men were in position
 394 N. Lloyd
can quite reasonably be explained as a sudden and panicked reaction to what he
found in the Jallianwala Bagh, because it was not merely 1,000 people that had
gathered inside, but, according to many Indian accounts, upwards of 20,000 to
25,000.55 Understandably, such a large number of people in an enclosed space
would have been extremely surprising and shocking to Dyer, who had never
been to the Bagh before and was anticipating a gathering of around 1,000 people.
With this in mind Dyer may have thought there was no time to order them to
disperse or to fire a warning shot. Given these considerations, Dyer’s earliest
explanation, that he realised his force was small ‘and to hesitate might induce
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attack’, makes sense.

Why then did Dyer abandon this simple (and much more acceptable
explanation) for his more elaborate statements about firing to produce a
‘widespread effect’ and to punish the crowd? There has been a constant suspicion
that Dyer exaggerated his motivations for acting in the Jallianwala Bagh and
became convinced that he had acted rightly, emboldened by the support he had
been given and eager to play the role of the ‘saviour of the Raj’. Sir Charles
Gwynn believed this was the case, suggesting that Dyer ‘exaggerated the
ruthlessness of his attitude and the deliberateness of his action’.56 The
Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, agreed and stressed
the difficult circumstances during the inquiry. He argued that Dyer, ‘a blunt,
honest soldier, under stress of a hostile cross-examination, appeared as having
made statements which he, like many other witnesses, was given no opportunity
of correcting and which, when he saw in print, he did not recognise as his own’.
Furthermore, divorced of their context and ‘telegraphed by clever propagandists
all over India and Great Britain, made it appear as if he had deliberately shot
down hundreds of innocent persons when he could have dispersed the mob with a
wave of his hand’.57 Edward Thompson, a former member of the Indian Civil
Service, wrote a short but insightful article on the massacre in 1932. He believed
that ‘pressure of outside congratulation’ caused Dyer to believe that he had saved
the Empire and embellish his motivations. Thompson regarded the massacre as
being essentially a tragic mistake, which was more a reaction to what Dyer found
in the Jallianwala Bagh than about punishment and repression.58 As anyone
who was acquainted with Dyer knew, he was not the type of man to admit
mistakes easily.
If the massacre was a terrible mistake, why did the shooting continue for six
to ten minutes? Surely Dyer should have stopped as soon as he realised the crowd
was not going to harm him? This is perhaps the most damaging aspect of the
massacre, that Dyer opened fire immediately with 50 rifles and continued for six
to ten minutes. Sir James Edmonds, a senior British Army officer, who had
known Dyer while at Camberley, wrote in his memoirs that they had been
‘carefully instructed’ in how to give aid to the civil power, and if troops were
called upon to fire on a crowd by a magistrate, a single round should be fired,
followed by five rounds, and so on.59 The reason why Dyer did not do this has
been explained by relying on his testimony; that he wanted to inflict terror and
 Small Wars & Insurgencies 395
punishment on the crowd and make a bold statement not just in Amritsar, but
throughout the Punjab. Yet this is problematic and assumes that Dyer had enough
time to survey the crowd, think about what he would do, and then proceed to
disperse them in a methodical, controlled way. Dyer seems to have been surprised
by the size of the crowd in front of him, which was much bigger than he had been
led to expect, and panicked. In any case, as soon as fire was opened, elements of
the crowd moved towards the sides, desperately seeking to escape the carnage.60
They were endeavouring to move through small exits on either side of the Bagh.
Dyer admitted that when he saw this he personally directed fire against these
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points, apparently fearing that they were trying to outflank him.61 Although Dyer
may have made a mistake in ordering fire to be placed on these areas, it was not
necessarily an indication that he had entered the Bagh with a preordained plan of
action, but rather a panicked reaction to a sudden surge from the crowd. When
Dyer spoke with the Lieutenant-Governor in Lahore several days later, he told
him that when he entered the Bagh he saw an ‘enormous crowd’ inside. Fearing
that his small party of troops would be attacked and swept aside, he felt there was
no time to parley with them. When he opened fire, he noticed that sections of the
crowd were moving to the side. He thought that they were manoeuvring to rush
him so he made sure that gunfire was directed upon them. After some reflection,
Dyer now felt that this may have been a mistake on his part.62 Dyer also spoke to
the Chief Secretary of the Punjab Government, Mr J.P. Thompson and told him
that he thought the crowd ‘was going to rush his men’.63
Eventually Dyer called a halt to the firing. Although some have claimed that
this was because his men had no more ammunition left, Dyer denied this was the
case and it seems likely that they could have kept up firing for several more
minutes. Why then did Dyer cease firing if he had apparently wanted to punish
the crowd? Dyer claimed that he only stopped fired when the Jallianwala Bagh
was empty, in other words, when all those who were able to leave had done so.
Admittedly, when firing ceased the Jallianwala Bagh was not ‘empty’, but
covered in hundreds of dead and dying bodies and many more wounded, lying in
the dust, or struggling to leave the Bagh. According to Dyer’s report of August
1919, ‘I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed’. He would
later maintain that ‘When 1,650 rounds or thereabouts had been fired, and
roughly ten minutes from the time of opening fire, the whole crowd had
dispersed’.64 One of those with Dyer was Lieutenant-Colonel H. Morgan
(124/Baluchis). He echoed Dyer’s words, claiming that firing only stopped when
the Bagh was ‘absolutely empty’.65
If it is substantially true that Dyer gave the order to cease fire only when the
crowd before him (or those who could) had dispersed, then this was –
technically, at least – still within the guidelines of minimum force; that ‘so much
force only is to be used as is sufficient to effect the object in view, namely, the
dispersion of the assembly’. It could be argued that if Dyer had ordered the crowd
to disperse, then it would have done so peacefully, but this cannot be proved. On
10 April, crowds had been repeatedly ordered to disperse by the authorities, but
 396 N. Lloyd
had to be fired upon before doing so. From the limited information that is
available on the meeting at the Jallianwala Bagh, it is clear that the speakers were
all anti-British and used the gathering to further damn what they believed was
British oppression and terrorism. Eight speakers gave orations that afternoon,
including Durga Das and Brij Gopi Nath. Das was the editor of a local nationalist
newspaper, Waqt, and was an ardent nationalist, heavily involved in the protest
movement and who regularly gave speeches critical of the Government of India.
Brij Gopi Nath was a 23-year-old clerk at the National Bank. He was the author of
numerous ‘inflammatory and seditious’ poems and was also alleged to have led
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the mob during the attack on the National Bank on 10 April.66 It is likely that
there would have been some stand-off if Dyer had addressed the crowd and told
them to leave. In any case, given the location of the Bagh, crowded on all sides by
houses and only being accessible by one main route – through which Dyer’s men
entered – it is likely to have taken considerable time for the crowd to leave the
Bagh, which may have increased the tension and the possibility that scuffles and
fighting would have broken out. Crowds had verbally abused and spat at Dyer and
his men during their march through the city on 12 April, and were unlikely to
have been any more welcoming the following day, particularly after listening to
anti-British speeches for three hours.
The nature of the Jallianwala Bagh is of crucial importance, and it is in this
respect that the shooting at Amritsar differs from those other occasions when
police and army units fired on crowds during 1919. The key factor at Amritsar, in
contrast to every other episode of firing during March and April (and in virtually
every other occasion until 1947), was that the crowd were within an enclosed
area and could not disperse easily. On other occasions when British troops
resorted to firing in April 1919, several shots were enough to either force the
crowd to retreat or disperse into the surrounding streets. In Delhi on 30 March
police units fired into aggressive crowds outside the railway station. Several shots
were fired, killing two men. The crowds immediately retreated, and the ceasefire
was given.67 At Lahore on 10 April, a small group of police encountered a crowd
trying to make its way to Government House. After repeated warnings and under
a hail of stones and bricks, the order to fire was given. Six rounds of buckshot
were fired and the mob ran off.68 At Amritsar on 10 April crowds were engaged
twice; the first was at 1 p.m. when three or four rounds were fired, causing the
crowds to retreat. A second, more prolonged, bout of firing occurred later on
(with 20 or 30 casualties being inflicted), but had a similar effect of ensuring that
the crowds moved back into the city away from the civil lines.69 If the crowds had
not retreated or fled when fired upon at any of the other incidents of firing in April
1919, it is likely that the authorities would have had to keep shooting for a longer
period of time, with the inevitable toll in casualties. The Jallianwala Bagh was the
only occasion when crowds did not immediately retreat, which goes some way to
explaining the high casualties. Because they did not immediately disperse –
because they could not – Dyer continued to fire, with devastating and tragic
results. When Dyer returned to his headquarters after the firing, he spoke to the
 Small Wars & Insurgencies 397
Deputy Commissioner, Miles Irving. He ‘came to me all dazed and shaken up,’
recorded Irving, ‘and said, “I never knew that there was no way out.”’70

Conclusion
This paper has argued that the Amritsar massacre of 13 April 1919 was a far more
complex and confusing event than is often assumed. At first glance, the
circumstances of the massacre and the testimony of Brigadier-General Dyer seem
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to prove that minimum force was not applied in the Jallianwala Bagh. Such a
view, however, neglects a number of important factors that had a bearing on what
happened. These included the limited time in which Dyer had to decide on his
actions, the unexpectedly large size of the crowd, the geography of the Bagh
(including its lack of exits), and finally the movement of the crowd that convinced
Dyer he was under attack. Only by appreciating the tragic and unique set of
circumstances that came together that fateful afternoon can we understand what
happened in the Jallianwala Bagh. In any case, given the definition of minimum
force as that which compels the crowd to disperse, it is possible to defend Dyer’s
actions as doing just that. The lack of exits from the Bagh, which was unknown to
Dyer, delayed this from happening for several minutes, with tragic results.
The point is often missed, but minimum force does not imply that there
should always be very little loss of life, perhaps a handful of casualties, but that
the force that is employed should be just enough to ensure that the objective of the
military commander is achieved, but no more. The use of the word ‘minimum’ is
a relative concept and can only ever be understood in relation to ‘maximum’
force, the greatest possible use of force that can be employed to achieve the stated
objective. Therefore, by simply focusing on the great casualties at the Jallianwala
Bagh, nearly 400 dead and over 1,000 wounded, is not necessarily an indication
of whether minimum or maximum use of force was applied to the crowd. This
highlights the problems with applying a definition of force that is to a great extent
dependent upon how those officers judge it. As Huw Bennett has argued, the
definition of minimum force was ‘deliberately ambiguous’,71 meaning that
simply judging Amritsar as a failure of this policy does not necessarily explain
why and how the massacre occurred. Sir Michael O’Dwyer put his finger on one
of the main problems with applying this doctrine: how can it be judged?
No one has ever questioned the principle that an officer repressing disturbances
should use only ‘the minimum force necessary.’ But who is to be the judge of that?
The Military Commander on the spot, who has to decide on the facts and the
situation as they appear to him? Or the politician in his arm-chair at Simla or
Whitehall a year later, who must inevitably be ignorant of much that was obvious to
the man on the spot and must at the same time be influenced by many
considerations, including political expediency, other than those before the
soldier?72
Although Amritsar seems an obvious example of when minimum force was not
applied, it only appears as such because of Dyer’s unwise explanations about
 398 N. Lloyd
making a ‘widespread effect’ in the Jallianwala Bagh. Had Dyer chosen to stick
to his first explanation, that he fired because he feared being overwhelmed by the
crowd, it is likely that he would have had a much stronger case. Unfortunately,
between April and August 1919, he elaborated on his motivations and began to
talk more and more about punishment and retribution. Why this change took
place is unclear. Perhaps he was afraid to admit that he had panicked and fired,
and instead began to think that he had been right to fire at the crowd. Contrary to
received wisdom, the Amritsar Massacre was not necessarily as gross a failure of
minimum force as is often assumed.
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Reassessing the Amritsar Massacre in this way certainly goes against the
grain of nationalist myth in India, which has portrayed those in the Jallianwala
Bagh as heroic ‘martyrs’ and Dyer as the epitome of British imperial brutality.
Nevertheless, thinking again about the massacre has important implications for
contemporary aid to the civil power operations and it should not just be written
off as a unique incident that was just about one man’s decision to ‘strike terror’
into the Punjab. The circumstances that Dyer found himself in were difficult and
potentially lethal. He had to restore law and order and government authority to a
large, hostile city when tensions were high; something that would have been
familiar to any coalition commander in Iraq in recent years. Unfortunately,
Dyer’s lack of intelligence and his willingness to act meant that he found himself
in an unfamiliar part of Amritsar and faced with a crowd of much greater
proportions than he had imagined. And it was in these circumstances that he
panicked and ordered his men to fire. The massacre may not have been
premeditated or conducted in cold blood, but that hardly mattered because Dyer
provided the burgeoning nationalist movement with a long list of hallowed
‘martyrs’ that could be used to criticise British imperial rule. Preventing such
events from happening and keeping the use of force restrained and within the rule
of law is as important in counterinsurgency operations today as it was in India 90
years ago.

Notes
1. Thanks to Dr Rod Thornton for reading this paper and offering his comments, and to
the reviews of the anonymous referees. The analysis, opinions and conclusions
expressed or implied in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily
represent the views of the JSCSC, the UK MOD, or any other government agency.
2. Dyer, Reginald Edward Harry (1864 – 1927): Second-Lieutenant, Queen’s Royal
West Surrey Regiment (1885 – 87); 39/Bengal Native Infantry (1887 – 88); Wing
Officer, 29/Punjab Infantry (1888 –1901); DAAG, Garrison School, Chakrata
(1901 – 09); Major, 25/Punjab Infantry (1908 – 10); Lieutenant-Colonel, 25/Punjab
Infantry (1910 – 14); Chief of Staff to Sir Gerald Kitson (1914 – 16); OC Seistan Field
Force (1916– 17); GOC Jullundur Brigade (1918 – 19); retired (1920).
3. Command 681, Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of India to
Investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab, etc. [Hereafter Hunter Report ], 29.
4. See Bakshi, Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy; Bond, ‘Amritsar 1919’; Collett, The Butcher
of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer; Colvin, The Life of General Dyer;
 Small Wars & Insurgencies 399
Datta, Jallianwala Bagh; Datta and Settar, Jallianwala Bagh Massacre; Draper, The
Amritsar Massacre: Twilight of the Raj; Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment: The
Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and British Judgment, 1919– 1920; Furneaux,
Massacre at Amritsar; Horniman, Amritsar and Our Duty to India; Lloyd, ‘The
Errors of Amritsar’; Mohan, The Punjab ‘Rebellion’ of 1919 and How It Was
Suppressed; Ram, The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: A Premeditated Plan; Sayer,
‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919– 1920’; Swinson, Six Minutes to
Sunset: The Story of General Dyer and the Amritsar Affair.
5. Gwynn, Imperial Policing, 34.
6. India Office Collections (IOC), British Library, London: MSS EUR E264/43,
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Sedition Committee, 1918 Report (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1918).

7. See Kumar, Essays on Gandhian Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919.
8. Evidence Taken Before the Disorders Inquiry Committee (7 vols, Calcutta:
Government of India, 1920) [hereafter Disorders Inquiry Committee ], III, 24.
9. See Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the Punjab Sub-Committee of the
Indian National Congress [Hereafter Congress Report ], 180.
10. For works on the reforms of 1919, see Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and
India, c. 1880– 1922; Robb, The Government of India and Reform: Policies Towards
Politics and the Constitution 1916– 1921; Rumbold, Watershed in India 1914– 1922.
11. For British counterinsurgency, see Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919– 60;
Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency From Palestine to Northern Ireland;
Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century.
For riot control, see Shoul, ‘Soldiers, Riot Control, and Aid to the Civil Power in
India, Egypt and Palestine 1919– 1939’ (PhD); and Shoul, ‘Soldiers, Riot Control
and Aid to the Civil Power in India, Egypt and Palestine, 1919– 39.
12. Thornton, ‘The British Army and the Origins of its Minimum Force Philosophy’.
13. British counterinsurgency in Kenya has attracted much criticism. See Anderson,
Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire;
Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya; Bennett, ‘The Other
Side of the COIN: Minimum and Exemplary Force in British Army Counter-
insurgency in Kenya’; Thornton, ‘Minimum Force: A Reply to Huw Bennett’.
14. Hughes, ‘The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the
Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936– 39’, 354.
15. Colvin, The Life of General Dyer; Swinson, Six Minutes to Sunset.
16. See, for example, Bakshi, Jallianwala Bagh Tragedy; Collett, The Butcher of
Amritsar; Datta, Jallianwala Bagh; Draper, The Amritsar Massacre; Fein, Imperial
Crime and Punishment; Horniman, Amritsar and Our Duty to India; Mohan, The
Punjab ‘Rebellion’ of 1919 and How It Was Suppressed; Ram, The Jallianwala Bagh
Massacre.
17. Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series, Volume 131, House of Commons, col. 1725.
18. Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment, 114.
19. Shoul, ‘Soldiers, Riot Control and Aid to the Civil Power in India, Egypt and
Palestine, 1919– 39’, 123.
20. See Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919– 60, Chapter 2.
21. See Thornton, ‘The British Army and the Origins of its Minimum Force Philosophy’,
83 – 106.
22. Shoul, ‘Soldiers, Riot Control and Aid to the Civil Power in India, Egypt and
Palestine, 1919– 39’, 121.
23. ‘The law which commands the suppression of unlawful assemblies, riots, and
insurrections necessarily justified the civil power in using the necessary degree of
force for their suppression. The difficulty is to ascertain what is this necessary degree
of force, and the danger of making a mistake in the matter is serious, as any excess in
 400 N. Lloyd
the use of force constitutes a crime.’ (Manual of Military Law, 223) See Raghaven,
‘Protecting the Raj: The Army in India and Internal Security, c. 1919– 39’, 254– 7.
24. Manual of Military Law, 216, 217. Original emphasis.
25. Ibid., 219.
26. Ibid., 224.
27. Brigadier-General R.E.H. Dyer to General Staff, 16th (Indian) Division, 25 August
1919, contained in Disorders Inquiry Committee, III, 202.
28. The proclamation read: ‘Any persons found in the streets after 8 are liable to be shot.
No procession of any kind is permitted to parade the streets in the city, or any part of
the city, or outside of it, at any time. Any such processions or any gathering of four
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men would be looked upon and treated as an unlawful assembly and dispersed by
force of arms if necessary.’ Hunter Report, 28.
29. Dyer to General Staff, 16th (Indian) Division, 25 August 1919, contained in
Disorders Inquiry Committee, III, 202– 3. Original emphasis.
30. Disorders Inquiry Committee, III, 118, 123, 126.
31. Hunter Report [Minority], 111– 17. The ‘crawling order’ required Indians, who
wished to pass along a street where an English female missionary (Miss Marcia
Sherwood) had been assaulted, to pass along on all fours. It was in place for five days
before it was cancelled on orders from Lahore. See Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar,
282– 5.
32. Hunter Report, 29 – 31.
33. The National Archives of the UK, London: PRO 30/30/18, Government of India.
Home Department. Resolution, April 1920, 7.
34. Command 771, Disturbances in the Punjab. Statement by Brig-General R.E.H. Dyer,
C.B., 5.
35. Ibid., 5 – 13.
36. The Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series, Volume 131, House of Commons, cols.
1727– 30.
37. Barrow, The Life of General Sir Charles Carmichael Monro, 190– 1.
38. Gwynn, Imperial Policing, 60 – 1.
39. Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar, 329, 440– 2.
40. Ibid., 423.
41. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 23.
42. ‘As a description of the occurrences to which we have called attention in our
narrative of events, “open rebellion” is, we think, apt and accurate; as a question of
inference it appears to use to be the natural and only inference.’ (Hunter Report, 66)
On page 68, the Report stated that ‘we can find no evidence in the material before us
of antecedent conspiracy as the mainspring of the disorders’.
43. For belief in a conspiracy see Disorders Inquiry Committee, III, 135, 138; Disorders
Inquiry Committee, IV, 24; Disorders Inquiry Committee, VI, 4; Disorders Inquiry
Committee, VII, 99.
44. Colvin, The Life of General Dyer, 176. See also Swinson, Six Minutes to Sunset, 47.
45. Hunter Report [Minority], 113; Congress Report, 59; Horniman, Amritsar and Our
Duty to India, 96.
46. For lathis on 10 April in Amritsar, see The Congress Punjab Inquiry 1919–1920,
Vol. 2, Evidence, 27, 51.
47. Colvin, The Life of General Dyer, 177.
48. Gwynn, Imperial Policing, 60 – 1.
49. O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it 1885– 1925, 365.
50. Dyer to General Staff, 16th (Indian) Division, 25 August 1919, contained in
Disorders Inquiry Committee, III, 202.
 Small Wars & Insurgencies 401
51. Disorders Inquiry Committee, III, 116. This information was, at this point, almost
certainly out of date and an underestimation of the numbers in the Bagh, but it seems
to have been the information on which Dyer acted.
52. Datta, Jallianwala Bagh, 164.
53. Brigadier-General R.E.H. Dyer, ‘Report of Operations 21 – 00, 11th April 1919 to
Genstaff Division’, 14 April 1919, contained in Disorders Inquiry Committee,
III, 216.
54. Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar, 442.
55. The Congress put this at around 20,000. Congress Report, 49, 59. The Congress
Punjab Inquiry, Vol. 2, 53. See also Lala Hardyal Mal (65); Sardar Arjan Singh (66);
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Mir Riz-ul-Hasan believed that up to 30,000 people assembled (67); Seth Lakhmi
Chand (Piece-Goods Merchant) (69); Lala Kishmori Lal (74).
56. Gwynn, Imperial Policing, 55.
57. O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, 322.
58. Thompson, A Letter From India, 103– 4.
59. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London: Edmonds Papers,
‘Memoirs’, III/2/17 – 20, 23. See also Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar, 440.
60. Swinson, Six Minutes to Sunset, 48; Datta, Jallianwala Bagh, 99.
61. See, for example, Mian Mohammad Sharif cited in Congress Report, 68; Draper, The
Amritsar Massacre, 88; Swinson, Six Minutes to Sunset, 50; Datta, Jallianwala
Bagh, 100.
62. Disorders Inquiry Committee, VI, 68; see also 34.
63. IOC: MSS EUR F137/13, J.P. Thompson Diary, 16 April 1919.
64. Dyer to General Staff, 16th (Indian) Division, 25 August 1919, contained in
Disorders Inquiry Committee, III, 203; Disturbances in the Punjab. Statement by
Brig-General R.E.H. Dyer, C.B., 8.
65. Imperial War Museum London: 72/22/1, ‘The Truth About Amritsar’ by Lieutenant-
Colonel H.M.L. Morgan, 5.
66. Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh: Punjab Government Civil Secretariat, 1920.
Home Judicial (C) Proceedings, June, No 61 –7, ‘Petitions and Orders in Amritsar
Conspiracy Case – Defence of India Tribunal (case no. 8)’, 1 – 2.
67. Disorders Inquiry Committee, I, 178.
68. Hunter Report, 36.
69. Disorders Inquiry Committee, III, 43. Hunter Report, 23.
70. Miles Irving cited in Thompson, A Letter From India, 102.
71. Bennett, ‘The Other Side of the COIN: Minimum and Exemplary Force in British
Army Counterinsurgency in Kenya’, 640.
72. O’Dwyer, India as I Knew it, 365. Original emphasis.

Archive Sources
India Office Collections, British Library London: MSS EUR E264/43, Sedition
Committee, 1918 Report. Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1918.
India Office Collections, British Library London: MSS EUR F137/13, J.P. Thompson
Diary.
Imperial War Museum, London: 72/22/1, ‘The Truth About Amritsar’ by Lieutenant-
Colonel H.M.L. Morgan.
Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London: Edmonds Papers,
‘Memoirs’, III/2/17 – 20.
The National Archives of the UK, London: PRO 30/30/18, Government of India. Home
Department. Resolution, April 1920.
 402 N. Lloyd
Punjab State Archives, Chandigarh: Punjab Government Civil Secretariat, 1920. Home
Judicial (C) Proceedings, June, No 61 – 7, ‘Petitions and Orders in Amritsar
Conspiracy Case – Defence of India Tribunal (case no. 8)’.

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