How the official casualty figures were arrived at is an interesting tale. Initial Brit attempts were to sweep the whole affair under the carpet. The Brit paper Civil & Military Gazette published from Lahore printed a compilation of the "Punjab Disturbances" (you can read the whole stuff at www.archive.org/.../punjabdisturbanc01lahouoft/punjabdisturbanc01lahouoft_djvu.txt -). You'll need a microscope to read about what happened at Amritsar – it's dismissed in 4 or 5 vaguely worded sentences. Naturally rumours started and the govt. was obliged to arrive at actual figures. That's ONE MONTH after the incident. So they asked the hospitals: how many casualties? Then they asked the people to come forward and volunteer how many of your families got killed/injured? Naturally people thought it was a new Brit trick to find out just who were at the Jallianwala Bagh meeting. They had seen enough of Brit fairplay and justice as practiced by messrs. O'Dwyer & Dyer and kept away. The Brits in effect said See? That's all! And that's how the official figures are so ridiculously low.
How can you fire more than a thousand rounds into a confined crowd of 10,000 and only hit so few? True there were more than a thousand officially injured but that's including those who got injured in the stampede. Why, more than 80 bodies were pulled out of the well alone and some had bullet injuries, but not all of them. So, were the soldiers visually handicapped and shooting popcorn?
The Madan Mohan Malaviya committee made its own investigations. People gave evidence and named names and gave addresses of casualties. The committee members were trained lawyers and scrupulously stuck to established norms of what is evidence and what is hearsay and gossip. The figure this committee gives is more than 1000 killed. This figure is more credible.
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Sorry to sound like a bore but here i go again:
How the official casualty figures were arrived at is an interesting tale. Initial Brit attempts were to sweep the whole affair under the carpet. The Brit paper Civil & Military Gazette published from Lahore printed a compilation of the "Punjab Disturbances" (you can read the whole stuff at www.archive.org/.../punjabdisturbanc01lahouoft/punjabdisturbanc01lahouoft_djvu.txt -). You'll need a microscope to read about what happened at Amritsar – it's dismissed in 4 or 5 vaguely worded sentences. Naturally rumours started and the govt. was obliged to arrive at actual figures. That's ONE MONTH after the incident. So they asked the hospitals: how many casualties? Then they asked the people to come forward and volunteer how many of your families got killed/injured? Naturally people thought it was a new Brit trick to find out just who were at the Jallianwala Bagh meeting. They had seen enough of Brit fairplay and justice as practiced by messrs. O'Dwyer & Dyer and kept away. The Brits in effect said See? That's all! And that's how the official figures are so ridiculously low.
How can you fire more than a thousand rounds into a confined crowd of 10,000 and only hit so few? True there were more than a thousand officially injured but that's including those who got injured in the stampede. Why, more than 80 bodies were pulled out of the well alone and some had bullet injuries, but not all of them. So, were the soldiers visually handicapped and shooting popcorn?
The Madan Mohan Malaviya committee made its own investigations. People gave evidence and named names and gave addresses of casualties. The committee members were trained lawyers and scrupulously stuck to established norms of what is evidence and what is hearsay and gossip. The figure this committee gives is more than 1000 killed. This figure is more credible.
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