Today is the last day of the calendar year. laughably, around dawn of tomorrow, countless dignitaries of Odisha would beeline at the Jagannath Temple in Puri to flatter the deities for grant of another whole year of pleasure without work or contribution. The temple administration, instead of alerting the ignorant biggies that the ‘lords and lady’ would take offence for this is not Their New Year and more particularly because Madam lakshmi, who prepares and serves food, is away at her parents’ abode on annual leave, struggles to keep the larger than life creatures happy and comfortable, having sacrificed the night’s sleep. No wonder, greedy servitors, to execute grand robbery from foolish pilgrims, force the deities to remain awake without rest.
* December is fairly eventful in history. Great revolutionaries including Chandra Sekhar Azad, Sukhdev, Rajguru and many others have slipped into oblivion. Born on December 26, 1899, Udham Singh is one of the rarest freedom fighters who was hanged and buried in England. The Jallianwala Bagh tragedy had occurred on the April 13, 1919. Nearly 15,000 men, women, children, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, had gathered at a famous garden near the Harminder Sahib in Amritsar on Vaisakhi, the Punjabi new year. Around 530 pm, General Dyer arrived with 65 Gurkha and 25 notoriously ruthless Baluchi soldiers who had 50 rifles and two armoured cars with machineguns. The vehicles were parked at the wide gates to block escape passage. Without warning once to disperse, Dyer ordered to open fire indiscriminately in the direction of the densest sections of the congregation to cause maximum casualties. Firing stopped only when ammunitions ran out. People died of bullet injuries, stampede, trauma and jumping into a deep well to avoid being killed. Around 120 badly wounded people were pulled out of the well but were left to die there without medical help. The rest died helplessly as night set in. A subsequent inquiry reported only 379 dead though more than one thousand had died on the spot. Surprisingly, the details of the massacre were not known in Britain till December 1919. But after learning, both Churchill and Asquith had openly condemned the action. They had called the act “monstrous and one of the worst outrages in the whole of our history”. What most people do not seem to know is the fact that Punjab lieutenant Governor Michael Francis O’ Dwyer was the mastermind behind the massacre. He had convinced Dyer that killing people alone would scare the revolutionaries away. O’ Dwyer and Dyer were two different persons. Nicknamed later “The butcher of Amritsar”, Reginald Edward Harry Dyer was born on October 9, 1864 in Muree, now in Pakistan, to a family of brewers. But after the Jallianwala Bagh killing, he went back to Britain and died a natural death on July 24, 1927. Even lord Chelmsford had believed O’ Dwyer was right in having organised the massacre in the larger interest of the empire.
* Incidentally, Bhagat Singh was so shattered by the killing of lala lajpat Rai on the streets of lahore that he shot a Deputy Superintendent of Police called JP Saunders in retaliation. Bhagat Singh was hanged after a summary trial along with Sukhdev and Rajguru while Udham Singh was in jail for subversive activities against the British. His only aim in life was to avenge the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Udham was born into a poor Sikh farmer family in Punjab on December 26, 1899. The patriarch of the family Sardar Tehal Singh worked as a watchman at a railway level crossing in Upalli. Udham’s mother died in 1901 and the father in 1907 leaving him and elder brother Mukta as orphans. One Bhai Kishen Singh Ragi put them in the Central Khalsa Orphanage in Amritsar. Udham passed matriculation and became a known revolutionary in 1919. He kept landing in jail off and on until released in October 1931. He named himself Ram Mohammad Singh Azad and began a signboard painting shop in Amritsar to evade police surveillance. later, he went away to Kashmir in 1933, duped police personnel and slipped out to Germany. From there, he reached Britain and managed to get a residence on Adler Street in london in 1934. A six-round revolver was acquired with six bullets. like the wise, patient vulture, he waited for his prey to appear at a vantage location where he could use his revolver. A joint meeting of the East India Association and the Central Asian Society (now Royal Society for Asian Affairs) was to be held at the Caxton Hall in london on March 13, 1940. Dwyer, then 75, was invited as a speaker to the event. As the former civil servant with deep ‘India experience’ rose to speak, Udham walked up to him and shot from a point-blank range. He had managed to carry the gun in a book cut fittingly between the covers to accommodate the weapon. Two bullets hit Dwyer killing him instantly. Udham did not try to escape. He was tried, convicted and hanged in the Pentonville prison in the UK on July 31, 1940. At the trial, he had told the prosecutor, “I have taken revenge. He killed a thousand innocent people. I am content and proud that after struggling for twenty years, my mission is over. My people are starving to death at home while the British masters are leading a luxurious life all around us. I feel honoured that I am dying happy that I will be dying after exterminating a most merciless colonial exploiter.” His revolver, a knife, his personal diary and a salvaged slug from the gun are still on display at the Black Museum of the Scotland Yard in the UK. Among great martyrs, only Bhagat Singh lives on perhaps due to a couple of movies made on him. Udham, his avenger who trailed O’ Dwyer for twenty long years under most difficult circumstances, is a completely forgotten name in India today.
Just as the news of O’ Dwyer broke out, the Congress controlled English-language Press in India condemned Udham’s action as violent and unforgivable. Mahatma Gandhi too condemned it saying “the Caxton Hall outrage has caused me deep pain. I regard it as an act of insanity. I hope this will not be allowed to affect political judgment.” Nehru wrote in his National Herald, “Assassination is regretted and it is earnestly hoped that it will not have far-reaching repercussions on the political future of India.” But the Amrit Bazaar Patrika and the New Statesman on their March 18, 1940 issue wrote, “O’ Dwyer’s name is linked to the grave Punjab massacre incident, which India cannot ever forget.” It was only Subhas Bose who hailed Udham’s revenge-taking action as absolutely correct. Interestingly, most of the world Press too held O’ Dwyer responsible for the grave Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. Even The Times of london had written, “An expression of pent-up fury of the downtrodden Indian people.” Today’s politicians, wealthy business people, wealthy writers, movie stars, cricketers et al do not even seem to know who all sacrificed, at what young age and with what courage!
* Among other notable December events in India, the most horrible was on December 31, 1999 the release of three dreaded terrorists to save some Indian lives aboard a plane hijacked from Nepal and kept in Kandahar. The move then was not appreciated by the world community because India then did merrily the easier wrong than the harder right.
* In late December this year, Delhi chief minister Kejriwal alleged that Arun Jaitley, chief of the Delhi cricket body for 13 years, is guilty of fake deals, conflict of interest, fudged accounts and forgery. Jaitley has sued Kejriwal for criminal defamation.
* In Odisha, the Jagannath temple administration has sought support from the government to make wide roads around the great temple to facilitate pilgrims circling the shrine in divine comfort. But planning of hotels on temple property would be sin as the age old culture of providing the poor with free lodging facilities would be gone forever. The best pilgrim-friendly decision is to scrap the hereditary rights of servitors who have far outgrown the required number causing havoc on all occasions, especially after the Car Festival went live on television to falsely glorify a few sects of servitors who have now turned arm-twisting blackmailers for money they don’t deserve. Further, the temple administration ignores criminally the dangerous use of plastic bags in the temple. The traditional eco-friendly palm leaf containers are gone. So are the palm trees and the magnificent weaving skills commonly seen among women of backward servitor communities that saved the environment in myriad ways.
What our law and decision makers may not know at all is that Italy banned use of plastic bags way back on December 31, 2010 when annual per capita use had hit a whopping three hundred bags.
May lord Jagannath free Himself of the grave plastic torture!
(The writer is a core member of Transparency International, Odisha)
