Have you ever read a book
titled ‘Gandhi & Anarchy’ published
in 1922 – written by - Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair, President of the
Indian National Congress in 1897, later elevated to the bench of the
Madras high court as a Judge and knighted in 1912 .. .. and his connection to this
day !!!
On this day in
April 2017, United States conducted an airstrike in Achin District, located in
the Nangarhar Province of eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. The airstrike was carried out using the largest
non-nuclear bomb in the United States' arsenal, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance
Air Blast (MOAB), with the goal of destroying tunnel complexes used by the
Islamic State – Khorasan Province (IS-KP).
The bomb was
dropped from the rear cargo door of a United States Air Force Lockheed MC-130.
On 15 April 2017, Afghan officials reported that 96 IS-KP militants, including
four commanders, were killed in the strike. According to an Afghan Army official, there
were no civilian casualties.
The American
Revolutionary War ( 1775 – 1783), also
known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was the armed
conflict that comprised the final eight years of the broader American
Revolution, in which American Patriot forces organized as the Continental Army
and commanded by George Washington defeated the British Army. The conflict was
fought in North America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic Ocean. The war's
outcome seemed uncertain for most of the war.
The Battle
of Bound Brook occurred on this day in
1777. It was a surprise attack by
British and Hessian forces on a Continental Army outpost in Bound Brook, New
Jersey, during the American Revolutionary War. Although the British aimed to
capture the garrison, they fell short and took some prisoners. U.S. commander
Major General Benjamin Lincoln left quickly, abandoning papers and personal
effects. Late on the evening of April 12, 1777, four thousand British and
Hessian troops under the command of Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis
marched from the British stronghold of New Brunswick. All but one detachment
reached positions surrounding the outpost before the battle began near daybreak
the next morning. During the battle, most of the 500-man garrison escaped by
the unblocked route. U.S. reinforcements arrived in the afternoon, but not
before the British plundered the outpost and began the return march to New
Brunswick.
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These are insignificant to what India suffered way back
in 1919 this day.
Often Indian freedom
struggle gets described in one pithy statement - Gandhi got us
freedom without shedding blood ! ~ how much away from truth, and why
the sacrifices and blood of martyrs was so deliberately buried under ? – how
can the Nation forget the bloodshed on that day in Apr 1919 ??- People have
died on battlefields, not on meeting platforms !
Amritsar historically known as Rāmdāspur is in the
Majha region of the Punjab. The Bhagwan Valmiki Tirath Sthal
situated at Amritsar is believed to be the Ashram site of Maharishi Valmiki,
the writer of Ramayana. This was also the place of Ramtirth ashram where Lava
& Kusha were born. There is also a tree here that marks the
place where the ritual horse from Ashvamedha Yagna of Lord Rama was captured by
Lava Kusha. Guru Ram Das, the fourth Sikh guru is credited with founding the
holy city of Amritsar in the Sikh tradition. The town grew to become
the city of Amritsar, and the pool area grew into a temple complex after his
son built the gurdwara Harmandir Sahib, and installed the scripture of Sikhism
inside the new temple in 1604.
Sadly,
Amritsar is also the place when on 13th April 1919 hundreds of innocents were
massacred by the British – the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, involving the killings of hundreds of Indian civilians on the
orders of Reginald Edward Harry Dyer. No event within living
memory, can ever make so deep and painful an impression on the Indian subjects
than the history or the very thought of massacre of innocents at
Amritsar. The ruthless execution has no parallels and this Nation
suffered economically more severely from the World war despite no direct
participation. It was the cruel General Dyer who had earlier
written a spirited account of his campaign against some nomad tribes
on the frontier of South- East Persia and Baluchistan in 1916.
The gory massacre was to
occur and make Baisakhi day April 13, 1919, a tragic day on that day, local residents in Amritsar decided to hold a
meeting to discuss and protest against the confinement of Satya Pal and Saifuddin
Kitchlew, two leaders fighting for
Independence (did we ever read about them in our school books ?). People were also
protesting implementation of the Rowlatt Act, which armed the British
government with powers to detain any person without trial. It was no violent
crowd – it had a mix of men, women and children, gathered in a park
called the JallianwalaBagh, walled on all sides having a few small
gates. It was to be a peaceful meeting of peasants and people and
included pilgrims visiting the famous Golden temple.
For one
man it was not a peaceful assembly - Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer
entertained himself, thoughts of a major insurrection and
thus he banned all meetings. On hearing that thousands had gathered in the
park, Dyer went with fifty riflemen to a raised bank and ordered
them to shoot at the crowd. Dyer continued the firing for about ten minutes,
till the ammunition supply was almost exhausted; Dyer stated that 1,650 rounds
had been fired, a number which seems to have been derived by counting empty
cartridge cases picked up by the troops. Dyer was removed from duty and forced
to retire. He became a celebrated hero in Britain among people with connections
to the British Raj.
For those
of us with little knowledge of history – the names are confusing
- there were two of them. Michael O'Dwyer, the
British Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab who approved the action and
Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer who executed the mindless massacre.
Uptil the
above can be found in many websites – perhaps the following is not so well
known.
Visitors
to the famed Guruvayur temple for sure would have seen the large and tall lamp
made of bronze, over 30 ft in height with 300 wicks – this was presented by Sir
Chettur Sankaran Nair.
He was the President of Indian National Congress in 1897, elevated to the
bench of the Madras high court as a Judge and knighted in 1912. In 1914, he was
invited by the Viceroy Lord Hardinge to become a Member of the Viceroy’s
Executive Council, the highest governing body in British India. He was the only
Indian member of the Council. Sir Nair was in the Executive Council
when the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh took place, and martial law was imposed
in the Punjab. Even in this exalted position, he had not been aware of the
horrors that were occurring there as press censorship was so severe in the
Punjab. When news trickled down he was horrified that he was part of a
government that had permitted these atrocities and resigned.
He
went initially to England to fight for the right of Indians to govern
themselves and later, on his return to India, wrote a book in which he blamed
the then Lt. Governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer for the atrocities
that were committed. In 1923, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who had been
Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab until 1919, sued Nair for libel. As Sir Nair
refused to apologise or retract, O’Dwyer sued him for defamation at the Court
of the Kings Bench in London to be tried by an English Judge and
Jury. In his book, Gandhi and Anarchy, Nair had written: ‘Before
the reforms it was in the power of the Lieutenant-Governor, a single
individual, to commit the atrocities in the Punjab which we know only too
well.’ The book had been written to attack Mahatma Gandhi’s Non-co-operation
movement, but Nair, who was a moderate, had not resisted the opportunity to
take a swipe at a man whose oppressive policies he, and much of India, regarded
as the real cause of the Punjab Disturbances of 1919 and the repression under
Martial Law which had followed them.
The
case was heard before Mr Justice McCardie in the Court of King’s Bench in
London over five weeks from 30 April 1924, and, apart from being one of the
longest civil hearings in legal history, was notable for being the only court
to air in England any of the matters arising from the Punjab Disturbances of
1919. The case was seen, and particularly so by the plaintiff, Sir Michael
O’Dwyer, as a method by which to vindicate the actions of officials of the Punjab
Government who had taken a hand in suppressing the disturbances, among them
most notably Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, the perpetrator of the
Jallianwala Bagh massacre at Amritsar.
In
preparation for the case, both sides gathered evidence from supporting
witnesses. For O’Dwyer, this was a relatively easy matter, as many key figures
who had been involved in India in 1919 were by now back in, or close to,
England and could appear in person. These included the Viceroy of the time,
Lord Chelmsford, by 1924 a Government Minister, First Lord of the Admiralty;
his Commander-in-Chief in India, General Sir George Carmichael Munro, by now
Governor of Gibraltar; and Major-General Sir William Beynon, General Officer
Commanding 16 Division in Lahore, Sir Michael O’Dwyer’s military equivalent in
the Punjab and Martial Law Administrator during the disturbances, who had by
now retired. So strong and impressive were these supporting witnesses, that
O’Dwyer felt the need to solicit testimony from only six men in India.
Nair
found himself at a very great disadvantage. In England in 1924 there were few
who were prepared to support his view that Sir Michael O’Dwyer had been a
repressive tyrant, and those who were, had little public standing. Nair’s
legal team was forced to fall back on depositions legally sworn by over 120
witnesses in India. Justice McCardie made it plain that he attributed these far
less weight than he did the evidence of those who appeared before the jury. In
the event the Indian depositions had little effect and have been forgotten
since. Sir Michael O’Dwyer won his case, and was able ever thereafter to
maintain that he and Dyer had been vindicated in a British court of law.
On 15th Aug 1947 India obtained freedom without
shedding blood – Gandhi was hailed as Father of the Nation and the leader of
Indian National Congress Jawaharlal Nehru became the first Prime Minister of
India – WE have read lot of history in our schools and colleges.
Nair's eldest daughter Lady Madhavan Nair and
son-in-law and nephew Sir C. Madhavan Nair (a legal luminary and a judge of the
Privy Council) lived in estate known as Lynwood, in Chennai. The British defeated Sir Sankaran Nair, while
Indians have forgotten him .. .. Sad !!
Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair CIE (11 July 1857 – 24 April 1934) was a
lawyer and statesman who served as the
Advocate-General of Madras from 1906 to 1908, on the High Court of Madras as justice
from 1908 to 1915, and as India-wide Education minister as a member of the
Viceroy's Executive Council from 1915 until 1919. He was elected president of
the 1897 Indian National Congress, and led the Egmore faction, opposing the
Mylapore group. He wrote a book titled Gandhi and Anarchy (1922).
Jai Hind
With regards to all those martyrs whose sacrifices have given us
this freedom.
S. Sampathkumar
13th Apr 2025.
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