Excessive Force and the Crisis of Colonialism
The use of explicit and extreme force was an indication that the hegemonic power of the state was not functioning. It was moments of breakdown in the state's overt restraint on the use of violence that indicated its instability and weakness, and provided the most powerful incentives to anti-colonial sentiments and mobilisation.
One specific instance was the passing of the Rowlatt Act (1919) at the end of the First World War, which aimed to extend special wartime powers that restricted civil liberties into peacetime, as a means of quelling postwar unrest. Containing the resulting protests in the Punjab, a province hit hard by the effects of World War I, led to the invocation of martial law. With restraints removed, General Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on a peaceful crowd of thousands assembled to celebrate a festival in an enclosed park in Amritsar on 13 April 1919. The Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, as it came to be known, was a defining moment in the history of the colonial state in India, when the implicit threat of violence contained in the various mechanisms of colonial control became all too explicit. The need to resort to such excessive violence demonstrated the fragility of the state's hegemony, opening the floodgates of criticism, undermining moderate nationalist hopes for a negotiation of a better position for India in the imperial order as a consequence of her loyalty during the First World War, and leading to the first of Gandhi's mass mobilisations, the Non-Cooperation Movement.This moment of crisis for the Raj was therefore one brought about by its own violence. In a subsequent commission of inquiry, Dyer's actions were construed as an aberration by a government unwilling to concede or imagine alternatives to the use of physical force. However, Dyer's actions are better seen as a ‘pathology of a system, rather than of an individual'.[105] The Congress mounted an inquiry of its own, in the process rhetorically constituting itself as an alternative government; its report indicted the government and its report on a number of counts, detailing endemic violence and daily humiliations suffered by the people of the Punjab. Dyer was part of an emerging pattern towards arbitrary and collective punishment as a form of coercion in British India, as the state began to weaken after the First World War.[106]