“What is the Aftermath?”

IN an article under the above heading in its issue of June 2, the Civil and Military Gazette makes an appeal to the Indian community to forget the past. With the spirit of this appeal we are in sympathy, and it is impossible not to appreciate the moderation with which divergent view-points of Indians and Anglo-Indians are presented in the article. A passage like the following, for instance, is an agreeable surprise in the columns of our contemporary:--“We admit quite freely that we fully appreciate the impossibility of getting the majority of educated Indians to see the Jallianwala Bagh episode in any other light than that indicated in the minority report” But when the Gazette goes on to say that we should be ready to let the dead past bury its dead in consideration of its own readiness and the readiness of those it represents to accept the findings of the Committee about the Jallianwala Bagh incident, it forgets that the sacrifices it thus demands of one side are immeasurably greater than what it demands of the other. In the case of the Jallianwala Bagh incident, the majority of the Committee have themselves arrived at a most inadequate verdict, while the only action which the Government of India and the Secretary of State have so far taken upon his verdict is that they have transferred General Dyer from India. Does the Gazette really expect the Indian community to accept this punishment, if punishment it is, as either just or adequate for a horrible misdeed, the like of which has seldom disfigured our history, and as a result of which at least (379) persons certainly, and a good many more presumably, lost their lives, and, if the General himself is to be believed, the number of the wounded must have been three times as many? What punishments have the official wrong-doers suffered so far? And until they have suffered any punishments, how can the accounts be adjusted?