Authors: Paul Scott
I could not but admire his cool and, as I thought, sensible appraisal. I suggested that this morning might be a good time for a drumbeat proclamation by the civil and military authorities through the main areas of the city forbidding gatherings. He had considered this and now considered it again. Finally he said, “No, it comes under my heading of provocation and reminds me too readily of the prelude to the massacre in Amritsar. It may also remind
them.
They don’t need the proclamation because they know what is allowed and what isn’t.”
I think that from this conversation—begun in an atmosphere of coolness almost amounting to distrust—I learned more about the workings of the civilian mind than I had ever done in a comparable time during my service in the country. I came away with a deep and abiding impression of the Deputy Commissioner’s total involvement with the welfare of the people as a whole, irrespective of race or creed or colour. He must have had many doubts as to the various courses of action to be taken, but I think he had to solve them all with, in mind, what his wife had called the realization that these were the people we were going to have to live in peace with when the troubles were over. In the aftermath of the troubles in Mayapore I believe that he was criticized for having “lost his head.” If this is true, I should like to put the record straight. White “went it alone” for as long as he was able, and I, in the few days in which circumstances made his task almost impossible, tried to make the best of a bad job. I should also put on record my opinion that White would have “worked himself into the ground” before admitting he was beaten if, on the evening of August 12th, he had not received direct orders from his commissioner (who was situated two hundred miles away from him!) and who, in turn, acted on the instructions of the provincial governor, to employ “to the utmost” the military forces available to him. I had a similar notification from my divisional and area commander. By the night of the 12th, the province, viewed as a whole, was certainly in a state of such violent unrest that without difficulty it
could be called a state of rebellion—one which our immediate superiors could only view with the gravest doubts for the immediate future.
That meeting on the morning of the 12th was virtually the last between White and myself that has left any clear impression on my mind. I have already described on an earlier page—as an example of the drill of military aid to the civil power—the action that afternoon on the Mandir Gate Bridge road when, as White had anticipated, believing the authorities fully occupied in reducing the student demonstration, the mob attempted penetration of the civil lines from the temple square, set fire to the kotwali in the vicinity of the temple and deployed towards the railway station. Simultaneously to the action this side of the Mandir Gate bridge the police were desperately defending the jail. Two of them died and the mob in that quarter succeeded in breaking into the prison and releasing a number of prisoners before a force of the Berkshires, who were rushed to the spot, were able to regain the initiative.
As readers may recall from my earlier detailed description of the action on the Mandir Gate Bridge road, the troops “in aid” followed up the advantage they had gained in breaking up the mob in confusion with their firing, by pressing forward. In this way, the main body of the retreating rioters was pushed back across the bridge, although small groups managed to escape along some of the side roads.
Halting on the civil lines side of the bridge, the platoon commander asked the magistrate, Mr. Poulson, whether he should remain there or cross the bridge and enter the city to command the temple square where already he could see new “leaders” exhorting the fleeing crowd to stand and form up again. Poulson, intent upon keeping the force of law and order intact according to the drill book, requested the Berkshire subaltern to remain at the bridgehead. Firing could now be heard from the direction of the railway station and Poulson assumed correctly that in crossing the bridge originally the crowd had split into two, with one body advancing along the Mandir Gate Bridge road and the other infiltrating along the tracks towards the railway station. He told the subaltern that if the troops crossed over into the square they might find themselves caught between the mob that was trying to re-form in the town and the mob retreating from the firing at the railway station. As it was, when men and women fleeing from the railway station came into view they found the Berkshires holding the bridge—their one line of retreat.
Unfortunately, in spite of Mr. Poulson’s prompt request and the
subaltern’s equally prompt response—to “open a way” across the bridge for these unarmed fleeing civilians—the civilians panicked at the sight of the troops and misinterpreted as hostile the movements of the platoon, which were actually made to give them way. Those at the front of the crowd tried to fall back and were trampled underfoot. Many scrambled down the banks of the river and attempted to swim across, and I’m afraid a number of men and women were drowned. This incident was the cause of great misunderstanding. We were accused by the Indians, later, of deliberately setting a trap and of showing no mercy towards those who were caught in it. Attempts were made to bring evidence that the troops at the bridge had fired into the mob, thereby causing many of them to throw themselves into the river. So far as I could gather this “evidence” rested entirely on the fact that several of those who were drowned were found to have bullet wounds when the bodies were recovered. These wounds can only have been incurred in the action at the railway station, when noncompliance with the orders to disperse, and attacks on the troops with stones and brickbats, had led to a volley from the troops. As I think I have mentioned, the police at the railway station were commanded by Merrick, the District Superintendent. He showed great energy and determination and recklessness for his own safety. Mounted, he continually pressed forward to scatter the crowd and stop it forming a united front. Only when he was forced to retreat did he give orders to his few armed police, and permission to the troops, to fire.
It was a bitter afternoon, the climax coming when news reached us at District Headquarters that the jail had been attacked and forced. By now a heavy rain was falling. Between five and six o’clock a storm raged overhead as if reflecting the one which raged on the ground. It was in these inclement conditions that yet another force of Berkshires (which I myself accompanied, along with the Deputy Commissioner) were rushed across the bridge in open transports, and closed in on the jail. The rain and the alarm spread by the news of the failure of the riots in the civil lines had reduced the size of the crowds on Jail road, and no doubt the spectacle of several truckloads of armed troops and the speed with which I had ordered them to proceed shook the determination of the men and women still in this area. Nevertheless the area in the immediate vicinity of the jail had to be cleared by debussing the troops and firing repeated volleys over the heads of the crowd. Once we were in control of the area of access to the jail itself, the picket gate in the huge
old wooden doors of the prison had to be forced with pickaxes. The insurgents had locked themselves in. They had also broken into the armoury, but fortunately their familiarity with such weapons as they found turned out to be practically nil, otherwise our men might have found themselves forcing an entrance under serious fire. Even as it was, one of our soldiers was wounded when, led by their platoon commander, the Berkshires entered the jail courtyard.
Their failure to hold the jail was the final blow to the rebels’ hopes that day, and as was usually the case when reverses of this nature were suffered, anger turned inwards. On the night of the 12th/13th when it could not clearly be said who had the upper hand in terms of civil control, factions of the mob took time off from harrying us to settle old scores between each other. There was looting and arson in the city, but it was directed this time against native shops and houses, and even against persons. A dead body found in the morning could so easily be claimed as that of a “martyr in the cause of freedom” who had been beaten to death by the police or the military! There were also a few incidents in the cantonment where small groups of men who had escaped along side roads and found places of hiding, emerged after dark and caused slight damage along the railway line. That night, too, a fire broke out in one of the depots on the railway sidings.
By now, the Deputy Commissioner had received the instructions from his superiors to contest the rebellion in his district with the full weight of the forces available to him, and I had been informed of this development by my area commander. My own “private” instructions were that if in the next few hours I deemed that the civil authority was no longer operational, I had discretion to assume full command and declare martial law. However, from what I had seen that afternoon, I believed that between us White and I could restore order so long as we agreed that the situation had deteriorated to below the point at which either of us could be held responsible for a textbook reply to every incident. I had told my area commander this, and added that my greatest concern was with the situation in Dibrapur which, after the day’s experiences in Mayapore, I took an increasingly serious view of.
I had a short meeting with White late that night. This was one of the several meetings which I have no really detailed recollection of, because they were now all taking place hurriedly and in an atmosphere of urgency, but I do recall his strained face and his immediate question on seeing me, “Well, you’re taking over, I suppose?” I said, “Do you
request that?” He shook his head, but agreed to my sending, on the morrow, a force to Dibrapur by the direct road south from Mayapore. But the area commander phoned me again that night from his headquarters and asked me to approach Dibrapur from the northwest on foot from the demolished bridge which, meanwhile, was to be repaired as quickly as possible by the engineers so that normal communications could be reestablished along the road as soon as Dibrapur was pacified.
The Ranpurs were held up constantly along that short ten-mile stretch of road beyond the bridge by road blocks and homemade “land mines” from which they suffered several casualties. In this way, my belief that Dibrapur had been chosen as the stronghold of a planned uprising was upheld and it was not until the morning of the 17th that I was able to report to the Deputy Commissioner that the town was once again in the hands of legally constituted forces. To assist the Ranpurs I had to send a company of the Pankots along the direct route southwards through Tanpur, and by and large the operation assumed something of the nature of a full-dress military attack. I declared martial law in Dibrapur on the night of the 13th, when the Ranpurs first entered the town. For three days they were engaged in restoring law and order. On the 17th an officer on the Deputy Commissioner’s staff again took control on behalf of the civil authority, and those of our agents who had appeared to cooperate with the rebels (the Indian subdivisional officer, a magistrate, and several constables) were brought back to Mayapore to be dealt with in the first instance by the Deputy Commissioner. This was the occasion when the subdivisional officer, by restoring money he said he had hidden to stop it falling into the rebels’ hands, was not proceeded against.
In the interim, throughout the district the rebellion had passed through increasingly violent stages of appearing virtually uncontrollable to a state when we could feel that the impetus that had set it in motion had been successfully counteracted. In any physical conflict the initial driving power needed to take active steps always seems to provide one with one’s sharpest memories. Discipline and drill then take over and come into their own, proving their worth, but providing the individual with no especially memorable recollections. But I do recall that on the 14th of August, another serious attempt to penetrate the civil lines was made in the names of the “Martyrs of the Bibighar and the Mandir Gate Bridge.”
One could not help but be moved on this occasion by the spectacle of crowds in which so many women, young and old, exposed themselves to
the threat of wounds or even death. One detected in the attempts made on the 14th a closer adherence to the Mahatma’s principles of nonviolence. It was as if, overnight, these simple townspeople had become disenchanted with leaders who had encouraged them to grab any weapon ready to hand and to believe that the police and the soldiers could be overcome by such means. Now they came in a spirit of unarmed defiance, carrying banners which exhorted us to Quit India and deliver to them the “innocent victims” of the Bibighar gardens. The crowd that attempted to cross the Bibighar bridge was composed largely of women and children and so touching was the sight of them that our men were reluctant to fire, even although while the women were to the fore, the orders were to fire over their heads. I noticed a soldier of the Berkshires break ranks to comfort a little girl who was running up and down looking for her mother, one of the many women, no doubt, who had prostrated themselves on the road so that the soldiers would have to step over them when pressing forward to clear the bridge.
There is little doubt that the affair of the assault on Miss Manners in the Bibighar gardens gave the population a “popular” rallying cry, but I never took seriously the arguments which were put forward to prove that it was the action taken by the police to “avenge” the rape that caused the riots in the town. The stories that the six arrested men had been brutally treated were, I am sure, quite without foundation, although once again I would add a reminder that the police, apart from the most senior officers, such as the District Superintendent, were themselves Indians, and there have been—it must be admitted—occasions in our history when white officials have been unfairly blamed for the actions of their native subordinates whom “by the book” it was their responsibility to control. I doubt that even the Indians, however, took seriously the tale that was told about one or several of the arrested men (all Hindus) being “forced to eat beef.” It is true that in the police you would find a fairly high proportion of Muslims, but if the populace had really thought the beef-feeding story was true, that would have given rise at once to a rumour that Muslim members of the police were responsible and hence to the kind of communal disturbance we were fortunate to be spared at this juncture. Such tales, in relation to the Bibighar affair, were no doubt the result of gossip after the event, when peace had been restored. Certainly no tales of this kind came to my notice at the time, and when they did there seemed to me to be no point in investigating them, which in any case it would not have been my job to do.