Jalliyavala Bagh Day | Jalliyavala Bagh Day SMS | Jalliyavala Bagh Day Greetings | Jalliyavala Bagh Day Pictures | Jalliyavala Bagh Day Scraps

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About Jalliyavala bagh Day :

In the morning hours of April 10th, 1919, a crowd that had been proceeding towards the residence of the Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, an important city in the Punjab, a large province in the north-western part of the then undivided India, to demand the release of two popular leaders against whom deportation orders had been issued was fired upon by a military picket. Later in the day, several banks and other buildings, either housing government property or otherwise emblematic of British rule, were set fire to, and here and there other acts of incendiarism were committed. Four European men were, in separate incidents, brutally murdered.

The infantry fired upon the crowd on several different occasions in the course of the day, and nearly twenty Indians were killed. Miss Marcella Sherwood, a Church of England missionary and a resident of Amritsar for over fifteen years, was unable to escape the wrath of the crowd. As she was bicycling down a narrow lane, she was set upon by a crowd that knocked her down from her bicycle, and then delivered blows to her head with sticks while she was still on the ground. Miss Sherwood rose to her feet, and had just started to run when she was again brought down. On the subsequent attempt she reached a house but the door was slammed shut in her face. She was again beaten and left on the street in a critical condition. The crowd then dispersed; Miss Sherwood was soon thereafter rescued, and prompt medical attention saved her life.

By the end of World War I, the British had successfully pacified the entire Indian subcontinent except for the states of Bengal and Punjab. Punjab, the center of Sikh power, had proven extremely difficult for the British to conquer and remained defiant. The British correctly predicted that any successful revolt against the colonization of India would need the support and backing of Punjab. Therefore, the British decided to crush Punjab once and for all through sheer terrorism. In March, 1919, the British enacted the Rowlatt Act. This Act granted the British government extraordinary powers: an indefinite extension of “emergency powers” that prohibited protest, the power to silence the press, and the power to imprison any person without trial.

By the next month, when it had become clear this arbitrary suspension of rights was not being respected by Sikhs and other Punjabis, the British administration of Punjab decided a large-scale killing was needed to fully intimidate the population. The obvious problem was how to give legal legitimacy to such a decision. In a brilliant move, by April 13, 1919, the British enacted further restrictions on civil liberties, including suspension of the freedom of assembly. However, thousands of people had already begun traveling to Amritsar, Punjab to celebrate Baisakhi, the founding of the Sikh religion. People had begun arriving in the city before they were able to learn of the newly passed laws. The British were then able to proceed with the massacre by claiming the assembly of people was illegal, when in reality there had not been enough time for the new laws to become known to the population. If the new laws had been passed on any other day, it is likely no assemblies would have resulted. Therefore, the British intentionally chose April 13, the day when Punjabis annually gathered at Amritsar as a matter of tradition going back hundreds of years, as the day to carry out the public demonstration of British power.

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