CONTROVERSY

AJNALA MASSACRE

OVER 48 HOURS BETWEEN JULY 31 AND AUGUST 1, 1857, EACH OFTHE 500 INDIANS IN THE 700-STRONG 26TH NATIVE INFANTRY WAS HUNTED DOWN AND “DESTROYED”.

LOCALS DIGGING UPTHE SITE ATAJNALA

archives. The Kalianwala Khoo also finds mention in all four editions of the Amritsar District Gazetteer published between 1883 and 1947.

Cooper records 237 soldiers, all “purbeeahs (men from eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar),” shot in batches of 10 by the firing party, gloatingly portrayed as “eager Sikh levies (young conscripts)”. Another 45 were allowed to literally suffocate, most of them dying inside a stiflingly hot and humid bastion adjacent to the Ajnala police station. Forty-one other men, who had initially managed to evade arrest by the British posse, “suffered death by being blown from the canon’s mouth” at Lahore. Frederick Cooper and his act of butchery in Ajnala drew wide condemnation in Britain. Northampton MP Charles Giplin’s blistering House of Commons speech on March 14, 1859, described the executions as “truly a cannibal affair”. There has, however, never been any official censure or even the hint of remorse at the brutality perpetrated in the name of the British Crown.

Despite the volume of documentary evidence that Kochhar collected, no one in authority was willing to cooperate with him. According to him, even qualified experts were reticent.“The main problem was that no well was visible at the site indicated in Cooper’s book and other documents,” says Kochhar, who believed the burial site was under Gurdwara Shaheedganj, a shrine built around 1947.

But confronted by the disconcerting prospect that the place of worship may in fact be sitting over the graves of martyrs, in December 2012, the shrine management, headed by Amarjit Singh Sarkaria, agreed to undertake an exploratory dig supervised by the historian. “At less than 10 feet below the surface, we struck the curved wall of the well made from old Nanakshahi bricks,” he recalls. With public contributions, a Rs 80-lakh loan and blessings from the Akal Takht Jathedar Giani Gurbachan Singh, the shrine was moved to a new location this January, making way for the momentous dig.

“Bole so nihal, Sat Sri Akal!” An anguished rendering of the Sikh war cry rang through the crowd on the discovery of the first remains on February 28 morning—a near complete skeleton with one arm raised, eight feet below the surface. “He must have still been alive and trying to crawl his way out from the heap of bodies,” Kochhar says describing the remains of seven more soldiers around where the standing man’s feet would have been.

The

scale of the tragedy, more than apparent in the mounting body count two days later, left Ajnala’s residents in tears. Though satisfied that he has been able to unearth the truth of the massacre, Kochhar laments that forensic details may have been lost forever because he was forced to rely on untrained villagers to do the digging. “No one was willing to support us,” Kochhar says, recalling how Navjot Randhawa, Punjab’s director, archives and archaeology, did not show up for the dig.

The historian and the Gurdwara Shaheedganj management had dispatched over 180 registered letters to almost everyone in authority—Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, state chief ministers and the Army chief. “Not one of them responded,” he says.

The remains of the 26th NI alongside other artefacts including 70 one rupee gold coins minted by the East India Company, gallantry medals and pieces of personal jewellery, now kept in the gurdwara, await the decision of a five-member committee constituted by the Punjab government after the recovery. This amid numerous calls for DNA analyses, an examination of British archival records to identify the soldiers and a memorial.

Over 48 hours between July 31 and August 1, 1857, each of the 500 Indians in the 700-strong 26th NI was hunted down and “destroyed”. Buried and forgotten over 150 years ago, the horrors unearthed in Ajnala have even now curiously failed to elicit response from India’s political leaders.

Barring Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal’s offer of financing the construction of a cenotaph, and former chief minister Amarinder Singh’s demand of posthumous military honours for the soldiers, the silence has been decidedly deafening amid the growing din of the elections. Rahul Gandhi hasn’t said a word. Narendra Modi, too, is uncharacteristically hushed.

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