The “C. and M. Gazette” and General Dyer

THAT the Civil and Military Gazette has a soft corner in its heart for General Dyer and other perpetrators of wrong in connection with the Punjab disturbances is a matter of common knowledge, but we never expected that the existence of this soft corner would carry the journal to the very limit of unreasoning absurdity reached by it in its issue of Saturday. In a leading article under the heading “Bombay bombast’, the Gazette subjects the comments of the Times of India on the Daily Mail interview, which we have already published in these columns, to a criticism which for its violence, its unreason and its total lack of proportion, has seldom been surpassed even in the extremist Anglo-Indian Press. The chief complaint of the Gazette is that the Times gives an incorrect impression of the view of Englishmen in India when it repudiates General Dyer’s statement that every Englishman in India approved his action and says that the statement constitutes a monstrous libel on General Dyer’s countrymen in India. As no plebiscite has been or can possibly be taken in this matter, the Times, we presume, is just as much entitled to its opinion as the leader writer in the Gazette is to his. After all, the Times never disputed the existence of a few Englishmen so wholly English in their views and their sympathies as to find nothing worthy of condemnation in General Dyer’s action. It repudiates a universal proposition of its own, unless the sentence in which it says that it is the duty of every Englishman in India to repel General Dyer’s libel is regarded as such a proposition. The statements are based on the writer’s own experience and limited to the society in which he moves. That experience and that society are different from those of the Gazette, but no reason why the Gazette should deny its existence or seek to minimise it. 

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