The Bagh massacre occurred in the province of Punjab, British India, on April 13, 1919. Thousands of Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus had gathered in the public garden on the festival day of Vaisakhi. Additionally, there was a protest planned in the garden in the early afternoon over the arrest and deportation of two national leaders.
On the morning of the massacre British Colonel Reginald Dyer issued a ban on all meetings in an effort to prevent the protest. He had become convinced an insurrection was about to occur. Without the communication networks of today the Colonel’s notice failed to reach the masses.
When Dyer heard about the gathering in the public garden he mistook the protestors and celebrating civilians as the beginning of the feared (and imagined) insurrection. The garden was a two hundred yard square and surrounded by ten foot walls with only five entrances. Each entrance had its own gate and was overlooked by houses and buildings. Dyer took ninety troops and, without warning the crowd in the garden, blocked the main exits. He ordered his troops to fire into the most densely packed sections of the crowd.
The shooting lasted for nearly ten minutes.
When the shooting ended many people had been killed, both from being shot and in the stampedes to the locked exits. More people died when they jumped into a well in the middle of the garden to escape the shooting. To top it off many more wounded civilians died from their wounds overnight when they couldn’t be helped because of the curfew imposed by Colonel Dyer.
