O’Dwyer-Nair case

AFTER a protracted hearing, the O’Dwyer-Nair libel case came to a close on Thursday last. Sir Michael O’Dwyer has won the case and has been awarded damages. No one in India, no one at any rate who followed the latest proceedings in the case, can say that this result was unexpected. It was in fact the very result which the public had been anticipating ever since the Judge had opened his lips in the case. From the first, he had made no secret of his sympathies. He had simply been ‘out- O’Dwyering’ O’Dwyer. He found nothing wrong in anything that any authority, whether civil or military, had done in the unforgettable days of Martial Law in Punjab and in every single case in which he interrupted a witness or put a question to him, he was defending some authority or some case of official bungling or other. The summing up was entirely worthy of all that the Judge had done before. It was not only a complete whitewashing of Sir O’Dwyer but an equally complete whitewashing of Gen Dyer, who was not before the court and who had not even been produced as a witness and subjected to a cross-examination. Even Sir O’Dwyer has said in his evidence that from Dyer’s statement before the Hunter Committee, his conduct was indefensible. The Judge would not allow even this qualified condemnation to pass unchallenged. His own deliberate conclusion, based upon the whole evidence given in the case, he said, was that “Gen Dyer, under grave and exceptional circumstances, had acted rightly and that he was wrongly punished by the Secretary of State for India.”