| On April 13, thousands of people gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh (garden) near the Golden Temple in Amritsar, on Baisakhi, both a harvest festival and the Sikh religious new year. It was in 1699 during this festival that the tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh created the Khalsa adding the name Singh or Kaur to every Sikh's name. For more than two hundred years, this annual festival had drawn thousands from all over India. People had travelled for days, before the ban on assembly, anyway unknown to them.
The Jallianwalla Bagh in 1919, months after the massacre.An hour after the meeting began as scheduled at 4:30 p.m., Brigadier Reginald Dyer marched a group of 90 British Indian Army soldiers, mostly Gurkha, Punjab rifles, Pathans infantry, Dogra regiment and Baluchi regiment, into the park accompanied by two armoured cars carrying machine guns. The vehicles were stationed outside the main gate being unable to enter the Bagh through the narrow entrance.
The Jallianwala Bagh was bounded on all sides by houses and buildings and had few narrow entrances, most of which were kept permanently locked. The main entrance was relatively wider, but was guarded by the troops backed by the armoured vehicles. General Dyer ordered troops to open fire without warning or any order to disperse, and to direct fire towards the densest sections of the crowd. He continued the firing, approximately 1400 rounds in all, until ammunition was exhausted.
Apart from the many deaths directly from the firing, a number of deaths were caused by stampedes at the narrow gates as also people who sought shelter from the firing by jumping into the solitary well inside the compound. A plaque in the monument at the site, set up after independence, says that 120 bodies were plucked out of the well.
'The Martyr's' well at Jallianwala Bagh.As a result of the firing, hundreds of people were killed and thousands were injured. Official records put the figures at 379 killed (337 men, 41 boys and a six-week-old baby) and 200 injured, though the actual figure, likely much higher, is unknown precisely to this day. The wounded could not be moved from where they had fallen, as a curfew had been declared. Despite the government's best efforts to suppress information of the massacre, news spread elsewhere in India and widespread outrage ensued.
Back in his headquarters, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer reported to his superiors that he had been "confronted by a revolutionary army".
In a telegram sent to Dyer, British Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O'Dwyer wrote: "Your action is correct. Lieutenant Governor approves."[21]
O'Dwyer requested that martial law be imposed upon Amritsar and other areas; this was granted by the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, after the massacre.
Dyer was called to appear before the Hunter Commission, a commission of inquiry into the massacre that was ordered to convene by Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu, in late 1919. Dyer admitted before the commission that he came to know about the meeting at the Jallianwala Bagh at 12:40 hours that day but took no steps to prevent it. He stated that he had gone to the Bagh with the deliberate intention of opening fire if he found a crowd assembled there.
"I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing but they would have come back again and laughed, and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself." — Dyer's response to the Hunter Commission Enquiry.[citation needed]
Dyer said he would have used his machine guns if he could have got them into the enclosure, but these were mounted on armoured cars. He said he did not stop firing when the crowd began to disperse because he thought it was his duty to keep firing until the crowd dispersed, and that a little firing would do no good.[citation needed] In fact he continued the firing till he ran out of ammunition.
He confessed that he did not take any steps to tend to the wounded after the firing. "Certainly not. It was not my job. Hospitals were open and they could have gone there," was his response.[citation needed]
The Hunter Commission's lenience towards the action failed to satisfy public opinion in India and the Indian National Congress instituted a separate inquiry of its own, coming to conclusions that differed considerably from the Government's. The casualty figure quoted by the Congress enquiry, for instance, was more then 1500, with roughly 1000 dead.[22]
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