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Churchill on Amritsar: An Imperialist Speaks Out for Human Rights
- By Martin Gilbert
- | August 12, 2022
- Category: Churchill and Asia Churchill's Character Truths and Heresies
“Ten years before Hitler’s adoption of the concept of schrecklichkeit, Churchill gives a perfect translation (‘frightfulness’) and definition of it by way of solidly rejecting it over Amritsar: ‘The inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.’”
—Manfred Weidhorn1
Note to readers
There was “no crime too nasty” for Churchill, declares the latest in a long line of Churchill attack books.2 Yet although its author mentions the infamous 1920 Amritsar massacre, he omits Churchill’s reaction to it. The reason is that it doesn’t fit the narrative. It shows Churchill as something more than an imperialist jingo. It shows him as he was for most of his life: a defender of justice, human rights—and, not the least, a foe of anti-Semitism.
Sir Martin Gilbert devoted a chapter to Amritsar in the Official Biography, from which this excerpt is derived.3 Readers will find the full text in Narrative Volume IV, World in Torment 1916-1922, available from the Hillsdale College Bookstore.
The Amritsar Debate
by Martin Gilbert
In July 1920, Winston Churchill as Minister of War defended the government in a controversial House of Commons debate. More than a year earlier, during a week of anti-British violence in the Punjab, a senior British officer, General Reginald Dyer, had ordered his troops to fire on an unarmed Indian mob in the Jallianwalla Bagh Garden, Amritsar. About 400 Indians had been killed and over 2000 wounded.
A government body, the Hunter Commission, condemned General Dyer’s action. At Churchill’s insistence, the Army Council had refused him further military employment. The Conservative majority in the House of Commons was outraged that a British general had been publicly condemned, while acting, as he saw it, to protect British life and to uphold imperial authority. A further reason for Conservative anger was that the Hunter Commission was organized the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, a Jew.
The Amritsar debate began at four in the afternoon on Thursday July 8th. Montagu was to begin with “a short speech.” Churchill was to speak later, at a time when his deployment was thought to best support the Government.
From the moment Montagu began to speak, the debate went badly for the Government—then a coalition under Prime Minister David Lloyd George. The Amritsar shooting could not be condoned, Montagu declared, and must not be repeated. He derided General Dyer’s claim that his motive was a desire “to teach a moral lesson”: To shoot and go on shooting, “with all the horrors that were here involved, in order to teach somebody else a lesson, [is] embarking on terrorism, to which there is no end.”
Racial humiliation or good will?
To the accompaniment of fierce protests from several Conservative MPs, Montagu went on to condemn both the whipping punishment which Dyer had imposed in the subsequent weeks, and the order that all Indians passing through the street in which an English woman missionary had been attacked must do so on their hands and knees. “Are you going to keep hold of India by terrorism, racial humiliation and subordination, and frightfulness,” he demanded, “or are you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill of the people of your Indian Empire?” Next Montagu denounced “the ascendancy of one race over another.” He ended: “I invite this House to choose,” he said. The choice was “fundamental to the continuance of the British Empire [and] to the connection between this country and India.”
The House of Commons reacted with fierce hostility. “Montagu far too provocative and violent,” H.A.L. Fisher wrote in his diary. “Everyone disturbed about it.” On the following day Sir William Sutherland sent an account of the debate to Lloyd George:
Montagu thoroughly roused most of the latent passions of the stodgy Tories and many of them could have assaulted him physically, they were so angry. It was not so much what Montagu said as the way he said it that roused them. Under interruption, Montagu got excited when making his speech and became more racial and more Yiddish in screaming tone and gesture, and a strong anti-Jewish sentiment was shown by shouts and excitement among normally placid Tories of the back Bench category. A critic sees of course that Montagu should have been quiet and judicial, and argued more on the merits of the Dyer case itself than on general principles….4
Carson for the defense
The Irish Unionist Sir Edward Carson condemned the Government for not supporting Dyer’s action. He described Dyer as “a gallant officer of 34 years’ service” and “without a blemish upon his record.” Josiah Wedgwood interrupted: “Five hundred people were shot.” Carson ignored him:
You talk of the great principles of liberty which you have laid down. General Dyer has a right to be brought within those principles of liberty. He has no right to be broken on the ipse dixit of any Commission or Committee, however great, unless he has been fairly tried—and he has not been tried. Do look upon the position…. [Before Dyer’s action] murders of officials and bank managers were rife. The civil power had to abandon their entire functions, and what did you ask this officer to do? To make up his mind as best he could how to deal with the situation, and now you break him because you say he made up his mind wrongly….5
Despite the shootings, Carson noted, Dyer had been promoted. He had been appointed to command a difficult military mission. For eight months no one had given him any indication that he would not be employed again. Now he was being condemned for inhumanity and an error of judgement. “I say, to break a man under the circumstances of this case is un-English.” This was a clear allusion to the fact that Montagu was a Jew. Sutherland called this Carson’s “cleverest thing…his quiet tone so apparently traditional and British which made Montagu’s excitement look all the worse: and Carson rubbed this in by innuendo.”6
Enter Churchill
Andrew Bonar Law, the Lord Privy Seal, managed the Government’s case in the Commons. He had not intended to call on Churchill until the debate had developed further. But the situation had become so serious that he asked Churchill to speak at once.
Churchill’s speech transformed the debate. It was essential, he began, “to approach this subject in a calm spirit, avoiding passion and avoiding attempts to excite prejudice.” He held the House’s attention by at first avoiding an opinion. Instead he discoursed on “the law of master and servant in the Army.” Dyer had not been treated differently than “hundreds, and probably thousands, of officers…. [And] there was no prospect of further employment for him under the Government of India.” Then Churchill exclaimed: “The conclusions of the Hunter Committee might furnish the fullest justification for removing him from his appointment…”
The House erupted. Commander Bellairs shouted, “No, no!” Churchill replied: “I am expressing my opinion. When my hon. and gallant Friend is called, he will express his opinion. That is the process which we call Debate….”
The Army Council had been unanimous in its decision to uphold Dyer’s dismissal, Churchill continued. But he also made it “perfectly clear” that whatever they decided, “I held myself perfectly free if I thought it right, and if the Cabinet so decided, to make a further submission to the Crown for the retirement of General Dyer from the Army.” Churchill then turned to what he described as “the merits of the case.” And here he had no hesitation in condemning the Amritsar massacre:
“An extraordinary, a monstrous event”
However we may dwell upon the difficulties of General Dyer…one tremendous fact stands out. I mean the slaughter of nearly 400 persons and the wounding of probably three or four times as many…. That is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical 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.7
The words “and sinister” were not in Churchill’s notes; he added them as he spoke.
Persons who take up arms against the State must expect to be fired upon, Churchill continued. But “an unarmed crowd stands in a totally different position from an armed crowd. At Amritsar the crowd was neither armed nor attacking.” Dyer claimed to have been confronted “by a revolutionary army.” But what distinguishes an army? “Surely it is that it is armed. This crowd was unarmed. These are simple tests which it is not too much to expect officers in these difficult situations to apply…. No more force should be used than is necessary to secure compliance with the law.”
True, it was easy enough talk like this “in safe and comfortable England,” Churchill admitted. It is quite different from being confronted on the spot with a “howling mob…quivering all around with excitement. I quite agree. Still these are good guides and sound, simple tests, and I believe it is not too much to ask of our officers to observe and to consider them. After all, they are accustomed to accomplish more difficult tasks than that.”8
“Frightfulness is not a remedy…”
Churchill went to praise past conduct of British officers and soldiers. Even under heaviest opposition, he said, “we have seen them show, not merely mercy, but kindness, to prisoners, observing restraint…even at their own peril. They have done it thousands of times [and] I do not think we are taxing them beyond their proved strength.” Even in far more trying circumstances than Dyer found himself at Amritsar:
There is surely one general prohibition which we can make. I mean a prohibition against what is called “frightfulness.” What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country. We cannot admit this doctrine in any form. Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.
Governments who have seized upon power by violence and by usurpation have often resorted to terrorism in their desperate efforts to keep what they have stolen, but the august and venerable structure of the British Empire where lawful authority descends from hand to hand and generation after generation, does not need such aid.9
Churchill then spoke of the shooting at Amritsar. The crowd was unarmed, “except with bludgeons.” It was not attacking. It was holding a seditious meeting when the firing began, and the firing did not stop until the ammunition was exhausted. That was a violation of all the guidelines he had set out. It was a blatant exhibition of the very frightfulness which he had condemned.
Historical reflections
Dyer’s supporters were convinced that the Amritsar shootings had averted the largest revolt since the Indian Mutiny 63 years before. Churchill challenged this as “foolish talk.” British power in India had greatly increased, but so had its magnanimity. Amritsar, he said, should remind us of the words of Macaulay, about “the most frightful of all spectacles, the strength of civilisation without its mercy.” Churchill continued:
Britain’s reign in India has never stood on the basis of physical force alone, and it would be fatal to the British Empire if we were to try to base ourselves only upon it. The British way of doing things…has always meant and implied close and effectual cooperation with the people of the country. In every part of the British Empire that has been our aim, and in no part have we arrived at such success as in India, whose princes spent their treasure in our cause, whose brave soldiers fought side by side with our own men, whose intelligent and gifted people are cooperating at the present moment with us in every sphere of government and of industry.10
Churchill ended by telling the House that he (like the Labour Party) believed Dyer should have been censured more severely. But the Cabinet had accepted the Army Council’s request that no further punishment should be meted out, “and to those moderate and considered conclusions we confidently invite the assent of the House.”
The debate continued for five more hours but was an anti-climax. This justified Bonar Law’s decision to put Churchill in early. Former Prime Minister Asquith followed Churchill, reprehending “that the civil authority [had] handed over something very much in the nature of a carte blanche” to Dyer. The pro-Dyer Tories found no comfort in these words.
Social justice: “unanswerable”
Churchill’s speech was a personal triumph, and saved the Government from a serious setback. The Times described it as “amazingly skillful,” turning the House “completely round…. It was not only a brilliant speech, but one that persuaded and made the result certain.” The Times added that Churchill had “never been heard to greater advantage” H.A.L. Fisher described the speech in his diary as “excellent—cool, but with imaginative touches.” Sir William Sutherland likewise described it as “an excellent speech” when he wrote to Lloyd George on the following day: “He really did very well…. “The House was as excited as in an old land debate in the prewar days. The interruptions were continuous and also the shouts.”11
Churchill’s defense of Montagu had not entirely countered the anti-Semitic feelings, H.A.L. Fisher wrote in his diary: “In lobbies they say Montagu’s speech will lose us 100 votes.”12 But when the Labour Party moved to reduce Montagu’s salary, only 37 MPs voted in favour, while 247 MPs voted for the Government. Sir Edward Carson’s motion, also reducing his salary, did slightly better, but was likewise defeated, by 230 votes to 129. General Dyer himself was in a seat under the Gallery when the figures were announced. A week later, on July 17th, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, wrote to Lord Curzon describing Churchill’s speech as “unanswerable.”13
The author
Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) was the author of 88 books including Winston S. Churchill, the official biography. His works on 20th century history and biography, the two World Wars and Jewish history are renowned. His memory is revered at Hillsdale College, most particularly by our President, Larry Arnn. Sir Martin’s lively website is managed by Lady Gilbert.
Endnotes
1 Manfred Weidhorn, Foreword, to Winston S. Churchill, India [1931] (Hopkinton, N.H.: Dragonwyck Publishing, 1990), xvi.
2 Andrew Roberts, “What the Marxist Ali gets wrong about Winston Churchill,” Hillsdale College Churchill Project, accessed 17 May 2022.
3 Martin Gilbert, “The Amritsar Debate,” Chapter 23, Winston S. Churchill, vol. IV, World in Torment 1916-1922 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2008), 401-11.
4 Sir William Sutherland to David Lloyd George, 9 July 1920, in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, vol. 9, Disruption and Chaos, July 1919-March 1921 (Hillsdale College Press, 2008), 1140-41.
5 Gilbert, World in Torment, 403.
6 Ibid.
7 Winston S. Churchill, “Punjab Disturbances,” House of Commons, 8 July 1920, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1975), III: 3009.
8 Ibid., 3011.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid, 3013.
11 Sutherland to Lloyd George, 9 July 1920, in Gilbert, Disruption and Chaos, 1141.
12 Fisher Diary, 8 July 1920, in Gilbert, Disruption and Chaos, 1140.
13 Gilbert, World in Torment, 411.
How quaint, a legislature having a debate. When is the last time either House of Congress had a debate? The speeches to an almost empty room are fine, but party discipline is the decider, except for the occasional “maverick.”
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Good point. It’s always impressive to watch Question Time in the House of Commons, however deft or clumsy the repartee, because that kind of give-and-take seems lost to our Congressional proceedings today.—RML