Click to play videoAs India enters its 60th year of Independence, CNN-IBN takes you on a journey to all the places where the freedom movement was fought, in the special series In August Country.
Amritsar: The bullet marks are still visible and the sun beats down on the bricks that bore witness to the murder of thousands of innocents.
The premises of Jallianwala Bagh still resound with heart-rending cries of those who were massacred in April 1919.
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| Over 2,000 people, who had gathered for a peaceful demonstration, were indiscrimnately fired at |
Of the 20,000 villagers who had gathered for a peaceful protest session, an estimated 2,000 lost their lives as General Dyer instructed his soldiers to open indiscriminate fire.
They tried to escape through the sole narrow exit, but there was no escaping the bullets.
It’s been 87 years and Jallianwala is a changed place. The maidan (ground) of 1919 does not exist. The narrow entrance, few walls bearing bullet marks and a covered well are all that’s left of history.
The ground where the bloodbath took place is now six feet under, covered by layers of concrete, stone, iron and has now turned into a commercial tourist spot.
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| The place has been renovated for tourists. All that remains of history is this well |
“A lot of changes have been done because lot of foreigners and tourists. They want something done. So as a national monument should be preserved, we need to make sure no bad impression is created,” Secratary, Jallianwala trust, SK Mukherjee says.
But the paint-job hasn’t left the ones who witnessed the massacre happy. Eighty-seven years later, 113-year-old survivor Babu Shingara Singh takes a trip down memory lane.
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| 113-year-old Babu Singhara Singh was one of the lucky survivors of the massacre |
“Most people come here for the drama of it. People who dare to come forward and die for their country again are very few,” Singhara Singh says.
The slaughter ground may be buried under, but some dusty files in the trust office have preserved sheets from history and have detailed accounts of the shock and outrage that followed the incident.
Though remembered as martyrs, not all who died here laid their lives down willingly, for their country. Most of them were hapless victims trapped in a brutal scheme that played out as planned.
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| The Jallianwala Trust files have recorded details of condemnation that followed the massacre |
But martyrs they will always be as it’s their tragedy on this site that changed the course of the India’s freedom struggle.
It was here that the British Raj of the past century was finally seen as something malevolent and menacing.
This gruesome incident catalysed Mahatma Gandhi's Satyagraha movement, prompted Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore to renounce his Knighthood and motivated the likes of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev to open a new chapter in India’s freedom struggle.
For free India, the incident may just be a case study, a reference point, for an understanding of history; but the monument stands a reminder that the memory of Jallianwala Bagh beats in the heart of every Indian.
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