LIST OF JALLIANWALA MARTYRS PUBLISHED

Over a century after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, an official list of 492 martyrs has been revealed, leading to a debate over its authenticity. A state-level function has been scheduled to honour the martyrs’ kin tomorrow at Amritsar’s Anand Park where a separate memorial would be unveiled.

The list is available on the Amritsar administration’s website. The relatives of the martyrs have been asked to submit documents to ascertain their antecedents. About a dozen people have submitted documents, claiming to be descendants of the martyrs. Historian V.N. Datta, who authored the pioneering work on Jallianwala Bagh (1969), claimed that around 700 people were killed. His daughter and associate professor Nonica Dutta, Department of Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, says her father had zeroed in on this estimate on the basis of local police records.

Nonica told The Sunday Guardian that at the meeting of the Imperial Legislative Council on 12 September 1919 Congress leader Madan Mohan Malaviya had said that 1,000 people had been killed in the massacre. “There is no clarity on the number of martyrs to date.”

The list of the dead and injured prepared by the British then for the purpose of awarding compensation has several discrepancies. This list at the DC’S office has 501 individuals with many marked as “unidentified”. The list was pruned to 492, as several serial numbers were left blank. A recent study by the Partition Museum Trust put the number at 547 with the names of 45 not known. A board in the precincts of the Jallianwala Bagh earlier put the death toll at 379 and around 1,500 injured. This was published by the Jallianwala Bagh National Memorial Trust. Also, it was inscribed at the martyrs’ well from where 120 bodies were recovered later on.