General Dyer’s defence

THE defence put forward by General Dyer in regard to the Crawling Order is not without peculiarities of its own. He never intended that people should crawl, he said. He only wanted that the lane, in which Miss Sherwood had been assaulted, should be regarded as sacred, because “we look upon women as sacred,” and he issued an order to the effect that “no Indians are to be allowed to pass along there,” innocently adding that if they had to pass, they must go on all fours. “It never entered my brain,” he said in reply to the President, “that any sensible man, any sane man would under the circumstances voluntarily go through that street.” As an instance of unconscious humour, this is difficult to beat. According to the General’s notion of things, want of sense and sanity is shown not by issuing a stupid order, but by being forced to submit to it. He repeated the same statement in reply to the pointed question of Mr. Justice Rankin, whether the order that if Indians had to pass the way they must go on all fours was not issued as a punishment. “In no way,” was the General’s reply. “I never imagined that anybody would go through the street on all fours.” Unhappily for the General, this statement of his is flatly contradicted by another which he repeated more than once, that “he was searching in his brain for a suitable punishment for these awful cases.” We assure the General and all whom it may concern that if he had really treated the place as sacred, and desecrated it by making it the scene of crawling and other abominations, there is not one patriotic and true-hearted man or woman in Amritsar, in the Punjab and in India who would not have warmly applauded his action. This, indeed, is one of our greatest complaints against the General.