Militants behead two jawans in J&K - Indian Press supresses story

India Today
Ajmer Singh  New Delhi, August 6, 2011


In a barbaric incident, which has shocked army officials, Pakistan-trained militants beheaded two soldiers and dumped their bodies during an encounter to check infiltration attempt near the Line of Control (LoC) in Kupwara district of Kashmir late last month.

It is suspected that the militants killed the jawans from the 20 Kumaon regiment, beheaded the duo and reportedly retained their heads as war trophies.

But, the army officials are not willing to accept the tragic story, as it might have an impact on the morale of the armed forces waging anti- terror operations in J& K. A jawan of 19 Rajput, who was part of the patrol party, also died in the cross- fire.

A senior Army official, requesting anonymity, disclosed that the two men of Kumaon regiment were killed and their heads were chopped off. Their bodies were also mutilated, he said.

The incident happened around Pak foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar's visit to the country, in the last week of July, disclosed the officer.

The martyred soldiers were identified as Havildar Jaipal Singh Adhikari and Lance Naik Devender Singh.

The details of the third jawan, from 19 Rajput, couldn't be ascertained.

The soldiers were cremated on Wednesday at their native places in Pithoragarh and Haldwani districts of Uttrakhand.

A state police officer, who was present at the cremation of Devender Singh, confirmed that the bodies were badly mutilated and not shown to relatives. The Army authorities informed that the heads were blown away during the fierce encounter, he said.

Lance Naik Devender Singh's uncle also admitted that the bodies weren't shown to the family members, and so did a 20 Kumaon regiment official. Militants fired rocket propelled grenades at the jawans, killing them on spot and blowing off their heads, the official said.

He, however, refused to share details of the encounter. Lt Col J. S. Brar, the official spokesperson, HQ 15 Corps wasn't available for comments.

Rajesh Kalia, the official spokesman of Udhampur based Northernern Command, said there was an infiltration bid near Farkian Gali, which is close to the Line of Control (LOC), and that they had lost three men.

When asked if militants beheaded Indian soldiers, Kalia avoided a direct reply by merely commenting that " details weren't available". But, the actual incident is quietly being discussed among the army circles in the valley.

A commanding officer of a Rashtriya Rifles ( RR) unit, deployed in the Kupwara sector, also privately confirmed that militants had beheaded two soldiers of the Kumaon unit.

Officers said that the trend of beheading armymenby the militants has resurfaced after four yeras.

A major rank officer of Kumaon Scouts, however, claimed that soldiers were martyred in a fierce encounter, which took place at 16.40 hrs on July 30, near Kupwara.

The ambush party had come under attack from three sides.

The barbaric incident is despicable and has outraged top army officers, stated one colonel posted in Kupwara sector.

In 1999 also, there was a national outcry, when Kargil hero Lt Saurabh Kalia and five Jawans were captured by Pakistani troops.

They were brutally tortured and then shot dead.

According to Lt Kalia's father's online petition, Pakistan had dared to humiliate India by flouting all international norms.
_________________________

The Birkin effect: Our jawans are beheaded

Pioneer 24 August 2011 15:26
Kanchan Gupta


Pakistan’s businesswoman-turned-Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar may feign to be miffed that the media chose to focus attention on her Birkin handbag, Roberto Cavalli sunglasses, Jimmy Choo shoes and South Sea pearls during her recent visit to India rather than her intellectual contribution towards peace-making between a terrorist state and its victim neighbour, but that does not in any manner diminish the fact that a calculated gamble by the decrepit civilian Government in Islamabad and the criminal military-jihadi complex in Rawalpindi has served its purpose and paid rich dividends.

The feckless political class in India has elected to be reduced to a bowl of quivering jelly in the face of Pakistan’s charm offensive, much as it was when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto brought along his daughter Benazir and managed to extract huge concessions at Simla in 1972 without raising any hackles. As for the media of this unfortunate country, led as it is by television channels desperate to grab eyeballs whatever it takes and ever-so-mindful of sensitivities across the Radcliffe Line, it has neither the time nor the inclination to look beyond the obvious. Given as we are to self-flagellation, self-doubt and self-denigration, it is only natural that our media, which frankly reflects our society without any distortion, should have seized upon Ms Khar’s visit to paint Pakistanis as the sub-continent’s beautiful people and Indians as the beasts. Nothing could have exemplified this better than the running commentary by the editor of a news channel comparing fuddy-duddies in the Government of India with the swish visiting Minister, and how we as a nation are straggling while Pakistan is boldly marching forward. It’s a pity that our media houses continue to enjoy the untold and never-to-be disclosed benefits of stationing their studios in Delhi and its suburbs; their hearts and minds belong elsewhere.

And so it is that ever since Ms Khar came to Delhi, showed off her sartorial preference for hand-made exclusive Hermes bags which she wouldn’t dare flaunt in the lanes of Karachi and conquered our Left-liberal commentariat which controls media content, rare has been the story or article critical of Pakistan or fair in its assessment of that country’s continued hate India, harm India policy that is implemented with the ruthless fanaticism of jihadis who have dedicated their lives to the mass slaughter of innocent men, women and children. Hence, it stands to reason that our media should have purposefully glossed over the barbaric beheading of two Indian soldiers by Pakistanis — it is unclear whether the perpetrators were Pakistani soldiers or Pakistani terrorists being provided cover by the former while trying to sneak into India — near the Line of Control in Kupwara district of Jammu & Kashmir. The ghastly incident, it now transpires, occurred late last month, around the time of Ms Khar’s visit. Sketchy details that are available suggest the Indian soldiers’ bodies were “dumped” on our side of the LoC, which would mean they were kidnapped, tortured and then beheaded, a ritual without which jihadis believe their faith-ordained task is incomplete.

India Today’s web edition, which has a story on the brutality, says “It is suspected that militants killed the jawans from the 20 Kumaon Regiment, beheaded the duo and reportedly retained their heads as war trophies.” The journal says, “A senior Army official, requesting anonymity, disclosed that the two men of Kumaon Regiment were killed and their heads were chopped off. Their bodies were also mutilated.” Such was the mutilation that the families of the soldiers were requested not to lift the shrouds covering their bodies. Quoting Army officials, the report identifies the two martyrs as Havildar Jaipal Singh Adhikari and Lance Naik Devender Singh. A third jawan, from 19 Rajput Regiment, was shot dead. His name has not been disclosed. The fallen soldiers were cremated on Wednesday at their native villages in Pithoragarh and Haldwani districts of Uttarakhand. But for the report in India Today, India would have remained ignorant of this horror story.

Unfortunately, the Army has chosen to maintain a strange silence. According to officials who spoke to India Today, this is because confirmation of the slaughter would ‘demoralise’ the soldiers on duty. But that’s balderdash: Jawans are not known to take the killing of their fellow jawans lightly, nor do they suffer loss of morale. If anything, it hardens their resolve and strengthens their belief that the enemy must be fought tooth and nail, till the last man standing. The capture and subsequent horrific torture of Lt Saurabh Kalia and five jawans whose mutilated, unrecognisable bodies were returned by the Pakistani Army did not weaken the resolve of our men in uniform during the Kargil war. While media is to be blamed for not sniffing out the story and splashing it (although it spared no effort to sniff out that Ms Khar was indeed carrying a Birkin handbag and that it could cost up to Rs 17 lakh and then went on to inform us why those who carry this bag are to be taken seriously) we must not overlook the role of our effete political leadership in keeping such details of Pakistani perfidy under wraps. It would not be unfair to presume that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, desperate to go down in history as the friend of a country that torments India, took personal interest in ensuring the story did not surface in the public domain; it would have remained a secret had an intrepid reporter of India Today not put it out.

Soon after I resumed writing for this newspaper in 2004 after returning to India from Cairo where I was posted on a Government assignment, I had penned a piece on a similar incident that had missed the attention of media and fetched no protest from the Government of India, headed then as it is now by Mr Manmohan Singh. Late in the evening on Saturday, April 16, 2005, an Assistant Commandant and a constable of the Border Security Force, on duty at Lankamura outpost on the India-Bangladesh border, a mere eight km from Tripura’s capital, Agartala, were dragged into Bangladeshi territory. By the time the BSF got them back, Assistant Commandant Jeevan Kumar was dead. He had been shot at point blank range. Injuries on his body indicated he was brutally knifed before being killed. Constable KK Surendran, seriously injured, was battling for his life. I must confess I do not know whether he survived that attack. On that occasion, in the absence of any official statement, I had sought to reconstruct events on the basis of what local residents had to say: The two men were rushed by a group of Bangladesh Rifles personnel in civilian clothes, dragged across the border and then set upon by their colleagues. All the while, the BDR’s men kept firing on the Lankamura outpost. The firing stopped around midnight, followed by a hastily arranged flag meeting during which Kumar’s lifeless body and a barely alive Surendran were handed over to the BSF. There was not even a word of condemnation.

PS: On Kargil Diwas I tweeted about Saurabh Kalia. There were numerous tweets in response, asking me who was Saurabh Kalia. Those asking this question were young Indians, well-educated and from middle-class families. A nation forgets its martyrs when it is led by those who hold martyrs in contempt and are elected to office by those who are bowled over by Birkin handbags, Roberto Cavalli sunglasses, Jimmy Choo shoes and South Sea pearls — namely, our selfish, self-serving middle-classes.

Reciprocity & Hindu Anger

Written by Francois Gautier
Wednesday, 29 December 2010 06:37


Reciprocity & Hindu Anger

This starts as a beautiful story. Once upon a time, there was a tiny village in South Arcot’s district of Tamil Nadu, called Kuilaplayam. Now Kuilapalayam is like hundreds of villages around Pondichery: it is peopled with Hindu Vanniars, a caste slightly higher than the untouchables, poor, living off agriculture, usually a few meagre fields of cashew nuts. But then Kuilapalayam just happened to be in the midst of Auroville, the international township, founded by the Mother of Pondichery, based upon the ideals of the great yogi and revolutionary, Sri Aurobindo.

Thus Kuilaplayam prospered: its inhabitants learned trades needed for the city: carpenters, masons, craftsmen, some of its children attended Auroville's schools and were educated along with western kids and in time graduated and went into white collar jobs. From a few cycles 40 years ago, Kuilapalama has today motorcycles, tractors, cars, vans, cable TV, cell phones, etc. The main road of Kuilapalayam which used to be only shady huts, became lined-up with fancy shops which sold everything, from vegetables to handicrafts.

And then the unavoidable happened: a Kashmiri Muslim from Chennai heard about Auroville and the prosperity of Kuilapalaym and understanding that he could make a packet with so many westerners passing though Auroville, he opened the usual shawls & carpets’ shop in the village. Now Kuilapalayam never counted a Muslim amongst its population in its 1200 years of recorded history; but in the true Hindu tradition, this one was welcomed and nobody raised an objection, although he was competition for some of the other shops. Our Kashmiri Muslim, seeing his success, called his cousin in Kolkata, who came and opened another shop; and that one phoned his friend in Mumbai, who also landed-up and opened a third shop. Still nobody found anything to say. Kashmiris are sociable fellows and they quickly made friends with Westerners, most of them blissfully unaware of the political situation in India, so business was booming, till they were seven or eight Kashmiri shops in Kuilapalayam. And again nobody complained, even when the fellows started doing their naamaz openly. “Isn’t God everywhere and isn’t He Krishna, as well as Allah”, said one of the villagers?

Then Rathinam, one of the young boys of Kuilapalayam, who had gone to study in Delhi, told his parents when he came back, about the fact that not only no Hindu were allowed to buy land or start a shop in the Valley of Kashmir, where the shopkeepers came from, but that four hundred thousand Hindus, were chased out of the Valley by terror, many of them having been murdered and that they were living as refugees in Jammu and Delhi. His parents started talking to their friends and there was the first hint of resentment against the newcomers.

Fifteen days later, the Amarnath row exploded. Rathinam’s father went to see a group of Kuilaplayam Kashmiris having tea and told them that Hindus never complained about their government giving billion of rupees in subsidies to Indian Muslims so that they can visit their most Holy place, the Mecca. “But when Hindus, he continued, need shelters, toilets and basic facilities at height of 15.000 feet to worship at Amarnath, one of the holiest places of Hinduism, why do you Kashmiri Muslims deny it to us” ? The Kashmiris looked a bit uneasy, then replied “that anyway the Amarnath ice lingam had been discovered by a Muslim shepherd and that Muslims had always welcomed their Hindu brothers to Armanath”. But this did not convince the Kuilapalayam man who had heard from his son that many grenade attacks had happened over the years against the Amarnath pilgrims. And anger started mounting in Kuilapalayam.

So it is all a question of reciprocity. Most Hindus are peace-loving people. The average Hindu that you meet in a million Indian villages, such as Kuilapalayam, is easy-going and accepts you and your diversity, whether you are Christian, Muslim, Parsi or Jain, Arab, French or Chinese. He goes about his business and usually does not interfere in yours.

In fact Hindus take it a little further: they hate trouble and go out of their way to avoid it. Have you noticed how every time there is a possibility of a strike or trouble, Hindus stay home? Or how - forget about rioting - Hindus never speak-up, complain or protest in a united manner. There is a UN Human Rights conference on terrorism in New York coming-up on 9th September and they have been desperately trying to get Hindu surviving victims of recent bomb attack to testify; but none are willing to come forward for fear of reprisals.

Not only that, but everywhere in the world, Hindus are hounded, humiliated, routed, be it in Fiji where an elected democratic government was twice deposed in an armed coup, or in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where Muslims indulge in pogroms against Hindus every time they want to vent their hunger against India (read Taslima Nasreen’s book “Lalja”). In Assam, Tripura, or Nagaland, Hindus are being outnumbered by Bangladeshi illegal immigrants and terrorized by pro-Christian separatist groups, such as the Bodos or the Mizos, while local governments often turn a blind eye. Their temples are being taken over in many states like in Kerala or Karnataka, and the donations appropriated by the state governments.

Yet, in 3500 years of known existence, Hindus have never military invaded another country, never tried to impose their religion upon others, by force or even by induced conversions. No, it has rather been through peaceful invasions that Hinduism has stormed the world, whether in the East, witness Angkor Vat, or in the West today, where the by-products of Hinduism, yoga, meditation, ayurveda, pranayama have been adopted by millions.

Hindus also gave refuge to all persecuted minorities of the world from the Parsis, to the Jews (India is the only country in the world where Jews were not persecuted) to the Armenians and the Tibetans today. The first Christian community of the world, that of the Syrian Christians, flourished in Kerala, thanks to Hindu tolerance; Arab merchants were welcomed by Hindu rulers to do trade and live in India, while freely practicing their religion, from very early times. It’s a pity that these two communities turned against their Hindus brothers and sisters, the former by way of lured conversions, and the latter with bloody invasions.

Thus Hindus, who accept everybody, welcome all religions, allow Indians from other parts to trade next to them, as it happened in Kuilapalayam, do not receive in return any gratitude and the same respect. On the contrary, they get mocked at, bombs are planted in their markets, their trains; their temples get attacked, they are chased out of their homelands; television an newspapers make fun of them, their own politicians ostracize them…

So, sometimes, Enough is Enough. At some point, after years or even centuries of submitting like sheep to slaughter, Hindus, the most peace-loving people in the world, those the Mahatma Gandhi once called gently ‘cowards’, those who cringe in their houses at the least sign of riot, erupt in fury - uncontrolled fury. And it hurts. It hurts badly. It happened in Gujarat. It is happening now in Jammu. It may happen again elsewhere, as Hindus are reaching a boiling point.

Yes, one should condemn the pogrom that happened in Gujarat, but one should look also in the causes. It is not only the 36 innocent Hindu women and children who were burnt savagely in a train by a mob of criminals, worse than animals. It is also how much silent frustration and anger must have built over the years, decades, or centuries even, amongst Gujarati Hindus, that in one moment, 125.000 Hindus, normal, peaceful people, many of them Dalits, tribals, or even upper middle class, came out on the streets of Ahmedabad with such fury. Yet, 25% of the people killed during the riots were Hindus; yet, according to police records, the 157 subsequent riots which happened in Gujurat were all started by Muslims.

Instead of trying to put water overt the fire, instead of appealing for calm and communal harmony, instead of giving us all this eyewash about a 500 year old Dargah mostly patronized by Hindus (but do Muslims visit Hindu temples in return), political leaders, journalists, as well as spiritual leaders, should do well to look at the root cause of Hindu fury, and try to address their demands and frustrations.

Journalists should also do a little bit of introspection and try to think for themselves. It is unfair, as it has been done in Ayodhya and after the Gujarat riots, to put so much blame on Hindus as if they are the worst criminals in the world and the destroyers of Nehruvian secularism. Millions of temples were destroyed in India by Muslim invaders, some of them the most sacred to Hindus, like the Kashi Vishvanath, Krishna's birth temple in Mathura, the rebuilt Somnath temple and the Treta-ka-Thakur temple in Ayodhya, and Hindus hardly ever protested. When they dare to destroy one disused mosque, without any human casualties, what a hullabaloo has been created year after year by journalists, Muslims and secularists. When Islamic militants plant bomb, they kill scores of Hindus every time. Do Hindus plant bombs upon Muslims? Does one journalist dare to say that? How long can Hindus accept everybody get beaten up and receive nothing in return?

Lastly, is there still a prejudice in Western society against Hindus? President Sarkozy said that he went to the Olympics’ opening ceremony because you cannot ignore a quarter of humanity. Well, can the world continue ignoring Hindus, 850 million in India, a billion worldwide, one person in six, one of the most peaceful, law-abiding, successful, tax paying communities on this planet ? Is it not time that a Hindu spiritual leader, God to tens of millions of Hindus, be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?

Why is India not giving visas to Pakistani Hindus??

Shame on you India!!

Kargil hero

Surabh Kalia

Rajneesh Sharma's torture and murder

When silence tells a story


He and his kith and kin were hounded for over a month. No human rights organisation came to their defence. On the fateful night of September 29, the lawless arm of the law finally caught up with him. He was whisked away from Jammu to Srinagar. A week later — on October 6 — his body was found hanging in the Ram Munshi Bagh police station in Srinagar. The police said it was suicide. Just five weeks after their marriage, his bride became a widow.

Rajneesh Sharma’s only crime was that he was a Hindu from Jammu who had fallen in love with a Muslim woman from the Valley. He did not convert to Islam. Instead, the girl, Amina Yousaf, adopted Hinduism and took the name Aanchal Sharma after marriage. Her father, Mohammad Yousaf, a Sub-Inspector in the Sales Tax Vigilance Department in Srinagar, could not reconcile himself with this. At his instance, the helpful State police and the pliable, communalised administration came down heavily on Rajneesh and his family. ......

While the local media covered this macabre tragedy in detail, the national dailies, with the exception of The Pioneer, almost blacked it out.

The torture marks on Rajneesh’s body, seen by scores of people on its arrival in Jammu exposed the brutality the policemen practised. There were cigarette burn marks all over. His nails had been pulled out. Other evidence of torture suggests that he was given the option of giving up either the woman he loved or his faith. The courage Rajneesh showed in the face of such torture — which has been confirmed by post-mortem as well — needs to be commended.

Let us contrast the indifference towards Rajneesh’s death case with how civil society reacted in Kolkata when an influential and rich Hindu, Ashok Todi, was accused of getting the police to help him deal with a Muslim man, Rizwanur Rahman, who dared to marry his daughter. The people of Kolkata, irrespective of their religion, rose in protest. Some of India’s greatest intellectuals went and forced the Government to order an impartial probe which led to the prosecution of both Todi and the police officers who colluded with him.

Contrast Kolkata’s reaction with the deafening silence in Srinagar and Delhi over Rajneesh’s custodial death. The victim is from Jammu & Kashmir’s minority community. Will Rajneesh have to become a Rizwanur to get justice in India?

Links
Ex-Muslim Anchal Rajneesh seeks justice
Hindu minorities insecure in J&K
Why is Rajneesh different from Rizwan

Shame on India!!

Saurabh Kalia’s parents waging a lone battle to highlight war crimes
The Hindu July 6, 2009
PALAMPUR: Capt Saurabh Kalia, the first to report Pakistani incursion in Kargil in 1999, was taken captive by the Pakistani troops and a few weeks later his mutilated body was handed over to Indian authorities. Ten years on, the martyr’s parents fight a lone battle to highlight war crimes against their son and other Indian soldiers.

N.K. Kalia and his wife Vijaya, who have settled in this town in Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, have been waging a war to highlight Pakistani violations of human rights and brutalities committed on their son, Saurabh Kalia, and other soldiers during the Kargil war in 1999.

Saurabh Kalia of 4 Jat Regiment, who was the first Army officer to report incursion by the Pakistani Army on Indian soil, had along with five soldiers - Sepoys Arjun Ram, Bhanwar Lal Bagaria, Bhika Ram, Moola Ram and Naresh Singh - for a routine patrol of the Bajrang Post in the Kaksar sector when they were taken captive by the Pakistani troops May 15, 1999.

They were barbarically tortured for weeks before being killed. Their mutilated bodies were handed over to Indian authorities June 9, 1999.

“Of course, his supreme sacrifice has made us proud, but what has exhausted, disappointed and dejected us is that the nation for which he has sacrificed his life least bothered to highlight the plight of war crimes at the international fora,” N.K. Kalia, 61, a retired senior scientist from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, told IANS.

“We have been shuttling between various government offices and organisations with the hope of highlighting the plight of the war victims. The Indian government has failed to deliver justice as it has forgotten atrocities meted out on six heroes. For days, they were tortured. Their limbs were chopped and bodies burnt,” rued Mr Kalia.

“Though the then Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre expressed concern over the heinous crime and promised to take up the issue at the international level, in all these years the issue got diluted,” he recalled.

“Even today our only demand is that it should keep its promise so that no POWs (prisoners of war) could face Saurabh’s fate. Had this happened to any American or Israeli soldier, the culprits would have been brought to justice.”

Vijaya, who runs an LPG agency allotted by the Indian Oil Corporation to honour his martyrdom, asked: “Is this the way the government treats its heroes?”

To highlight the plight of the war victims, Saurabh Kalia’s father has started an online signature campaign.

“The pain of losing a young son is hard to describe in words. But we feel contended with the fact that many citizens have supported us through online signature campaign. Till date more than 13,000 people have put up their signatures,” N.K. Kalia said.

Saurabh Kalia, who was posted in Kargil as his first posting after passing out of the Indian Military Academy, did not even live long enough to receive his first pay packet as an officer.

Today, his photographs, his uniforms, shoes and mementoes are kept in his room, which has been named ‘Saurabh Smriti Kaksha’ (a museum), in the Kalias’ four-bedroom house in the serene hills of Palampur.

The Himachal Pradesh government as a mark of respect has raised ‘Saurabh Van Vihar’ in a sprawling area of 35 acres here besides renaming a street in the town as Capt Saurabh Kalia Marg. A nursing college in the proposed Vivekanand Medical Research Trust Hospital here is being raised in martyr’s memory. - IANS

Post WW II photographs that British authorities tried to keep hidden

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Monday 3 April 2006



Archive pictures of German prisoners held by the British following the second world war.

For almost 60 years, the evidence of Britain's clandestine torture programme in postwar Germany has lain hidden in the government's files. Harrowing photographs of young men who had survived being systematically starved, as well as beaten, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme cold, were considered too shocking to be seen.

As one minister of the day wrote, as few people as possible should be aware that British authorities had treated prisoners "in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps".

Many other photographs known to have been taken have vanished from the archives, and even this year some government officials were arguing that none should be published.

The pictures show suspected communists who were tortured in an attempt to gather information about Soviet military intentions and intelligence methods at a time when some British officials were convinced that a third world war was only months away.

Others interrogated at the same prison, at Bad Nenndorf, near Hanover, included Nazis, prominent German industrialists of the Hitler era, and former members of the SS.

At least two men suspected of being communists were starved to death, at least one was beaten to death, others suffered serious illness or injuries, and many lost toes to frostbite.

The appalling treatment of the 372 men and 44 women who were interrogated at Bad Nenndorf between 1945 and 1947 are detailed in a report by a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Tom Hayward. He had been called in by senior army officers to investigate the mistreatment of inmates, partly as a result of the evidence provided by these photographs.

Insp Hayward's report remained secret until last December, when the Guardian secured its release under the Freedom of Information Act. The photographs seen here were removed before the Foreign Office released the report, apparently because the Ministry of Defence did not wish them to be published. That decision was reversed last week, following an appeal by the Guardian.

One of the men photographed, Gerhard Menzel, 23, a student, was arrested by British intelligence officers in Hamburg in June 1946. He had fallen under suspicion because he was believed to have travelled to the British-controlled zone of Germany from Omsk in Siberia, where he had been a prisoner of war. His weight, measured several weeks after his arrest at 10st 3lb, had fallen to 7st 10lb by the time he was transferred from Bad Nenndorf to a British-run internment camp eight months later.

In the meantime, he told Hayward, his hands had been chained behind his back for up to 16 days at a time, periods during which he was repeatedly punched in the face. He had also been held in a bare, freezing cell for up to two weeks at a time and doused in cold water every 30 minutes from 4.30am until midnight, a practice the detective discovered to have been common.

A doctor at the internment camp reported that Mr Menzel was one of a group of 12 inmates transferred from Bad Nenndorf, all emaciated and dressed in rags. Previous arrivals had also been half-starved. Some had facial scars, apparently the result of beatings. A few had scars on their shins, said to be the result of torture with shin screws which had been retrieved from a Gestapo prison at Hamburg.

Mr Menzel "was only skin and bones," the doctor wrote. "He could neither walk nor stand up without assistance, and could only speak with difficulty because his tongue and lips were swollen and broken open.

"It was impossible to take his body temperature because it was not higher than 35 degrees Celsius and the thermometer only starts at 35."

The prisoner was also confused, anxious and suffering memory loss, his lungs were badly infected and his blood pressure was dangerously low. Only after being washed, fed and heated with lamps could his body temperature be raised to 36.3C, but the doctor feared his chances of survival were slim.

Another man pictured, Heinz Biedermann, 20, a clerk, had been arrested in October 1946 because he was in the British zone, while his father, who lived at Stendal in the Russian zone, had been identified as "an ardent communist". By the time he was transferred from Bad Nenndorf four months later his weight had fallen from 11st 3lb to 7st 12lb. He said he had been held in solitary confinement for much of the time, threatened with execution, and forced to live and sleep in sub-zero temperatures while barely clothed.

One British army guard told Inspector Hayward that Mr Biedermann had "wasted like a candle" during his imprisonment. Another, a private in the Essex Regiment, told the detective that he complained that he and his comrades were behaving as badly as Germans. "I became very unpopular after this ... the sergeant appeared to take a poor view of my remarks."

On Mr Biedermann's transfer to the internment camp, an officer at Bad Nenndorf requested he be detained "for an adequate time" to prevent him giving the Soviets "detailed information on this centre and methods of interrogation".

Foreign Office records show that the navy officer commanding the internment camp, Captain Arthur Curtis, was so shocked by the condition of the men being sent to him that he ordered these photographs be taken to support his complaints about the treatment of these "living skeletons". Photographs of several other prisoners, taken at the same time, appear to have vanished from the Foreign Office files.

On the other side of the British zone, meanwhile, a Royal Artillery officer was complaining about the state of Bad Nenndorf inmates who were being dumped from a truck at the entrance to a military hospital. Some weighed little more than six stones, and two died shortly after their arrival.

The records show that Bad Nenndorf was run by a War Office department called the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC).

By late 1946, CSDIC appears to have lost interest in Nazis, and was targeting communists. It appears the prisoners were questioned about Soviet methods and intentions, rather than about the Communist party itself.

Some of Bad Nenndorf's inmates were indeed spying for the Soviets: one prisoner, who was half-Norwegian and half-Russian, told Hayward he was an officer in the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, and had been operating continuously in Germany since 1938. Another, a German journalist who had been freed by the Soviets from a Gestapo prison, was caught flying into Croydon aerodrome with false British papers. Both men were starved and badly tortured.

Others clearly were not spies, however. One man who was starved to death was a gay ex-soldier caught with forged papers while crossing into the British zone in search of his lover, while the other was a young German who was being interrogated because he had volunteered to spy for the British in the Russian zone, and was wrongly suspected of lying because of an official error over his medical records.

Four British officers were court martialled after Hayward's investigation. Declassified documents show that the hearings were held largely behind closed doors to prevent the Soviets from discovering that Russians were being detained.

Another consideration was admitted to be the determination to conceal the existence of several other CSDIC prisons. While it is now known that one interrogation centre was in central London, little is known about those in Germany, other than their locations.

Following the courts martial, the prison at Bad Nenndorf, which was in a converted bath-house, was replaced with a purpose-built interrogation centre near an RAF base at Gütersloh, and orders were issued for inmates to be examined by a doctor before interrogation. It is unclear when this centre closed.

The only officer at Bad Nenndorf to be convicted was the prison doctor. At the age of 49, his sentence was to be dismissed from the army. The commanding officer, Colonel Robin Stephens, was cleared of a charge of "disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind" and told he was free to apply to rejoin his former employers at MI5.

Exterminate the Race (of Indians) - Charles Dickens

The East offering its riches to Britannia, by Spiridione Roma


Loot: in search of the East India Company
Nick Robins, 22 - 01 - 2003

Concerns about corporate power and responsibility are as old as the corporation itself. In this account of the East India Company, the world’s first transnational corporation, Nick Robins argues that an unholy alliance between British government, military and commerce held India in slavery, reversed the flow of trade and cultural influence forever between the East and West and then sunk almost without trace under the weight of colonial guilt.

Ours is a corporate age. Yet, amid the fertile arguments on how to tame and transform today's corporations, there is a curious absence, a sense that the current era of business dominance is somehow unique. For there was a time when corporations really ruled the world, and among the commercial dinosaurs that once straddled the globe, Britain's East India Company looms large. At its height, the Company ruled over a fifth of the world's people, generated a revenue greater than the whole of Britain and commanded a private army a quarter of a million strong.
Warren Hastings'The most formidable commercial republic known to the world' Warren Hastings, 1780 (1732–1818).

Although it started out as a speculative vehicle to import precious spices from the East Indies – modern-day Indonesia – the Company grew to fame and fortune by trading with and then conquering India. And for many Indians, it was the Company's plunder that first de-industrialised their country and then provided the finance that fuelled Britain's own industrial revolution. In essence, the Honourable East India Company found India rich and left it poor.

But visit London today, where the Company was headquartered for over 250 years, and nothing is there to mark its rise and fall, its power and its crimes. Like a snake, the City seems embarrassed of an earlier skin. All that remains is a pub – the East India Arms on Fenchurch Street. Cramped, but popular with office workers, the pub stands at the centre of the Company's former commercial universe.

The absence of any memorial to the East India Company is peculiar. For this was not just any corporation. Not only was it the first major shareholder owned company, but it was also a pivot that changed the course of economic history. During its lifetime, the Company first reversed the ancient flow of wealth from West to East, and then put in place new systems of exchange and exploitation. From Roman times, Europe had always been Asia's commercial supplicant, shipping out gold and silver in return for spices, textiles and luxury goods. And for the first 150 years after its establishment by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, the Company had to repeat this practice; there was simply nothing that England could export that the East wanted to buy.

The situation changed dramatically in the middle of the 18th century, as the Company's officials took advantage of the decline of the Mughal Empire and began to acquire the hinterland beyond its vulnerable coastal trading posts. Territorial control enabled the Company both to manipulate the terms of trade in its favour and gouge taxes from the lands it ruled. Within a few years of Clive's freak victory over the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey in 1757, the Company had managed to halt the export of bullion eastwards, creating what has poetically been called the 'unrequited trade' – using the East's own resources to pay for exports back to Europe. The impacts of this huge siphoning of wealth were immense, creating a 'misery' of 'an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before', in the words of a columnist writing for the New York Tribune in 1853, one Karl Marx.

'An unbounded ocean of business'

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731)

Established as a means to capture control of the pepper trade from the Dutch, the East India Company prospered as an importer of luxury goods, first textiles and then tea. From the middle of the 17th century on, the growing influx of cottons radically improved hygiene and comfort, while tea transformed the customs and daily calendar of the people. And it was in the huge five-acre warehouse complex at Cutlers Gardens that these goods were stored prior to auction at East India House. Here, over 4,000 workers sorted and guarded the Company's stocks of wondrous Indian textiles: calicoes, muslins and dungarees, ginghams, chintzes and seersuckers, taffetas, alliballlies and hum hums. Today, the Company's past at Cutlers Gardens is marked with ceramic tiles that bear a ring of words: 'silks, skins, tea, ivory, carpets, spices, feathers, cottons', but still no mention of the company itself.

This lifestyle revolution was not without opposition. For hundreds of years, India had been renowned as the workshop of the world, combining great skill with phenomenally low labour costs in textile production. As the Company's imports grew, so local manufacturers in England panicked. In 1699, things came to a head and London's silk weavers rioted, storming East India House in protest at cheap imports from India. The following year, Parliament prohibited the import of all dyed and printed cloth from the East, an act to be followed 20 years later by a complete ban on the use or wearing of all printed calicoes in England – the first of many efforts to protect the European cloth industry from Asian competition. And it was behind these protectionist barriers that England's mechanised textile industry was to grow and eventually crush India's handloom industry.

'What is England now? A sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs'

Horace Walpole, 1773 (1717–1797)


Standing on Leadenhall Street facing the site of East India House, it is difficult to appreciate the raw energy, envy and horror that the Company generated in 18th-century England. Today, Richard Rogers' sleek Lloyds insurance building stands on the site, but on auction days in the 18th century, the noise of 'howling and yelling' from the Sale Room could be heard through the stone walls on the street outside.

For 30 years after Robert Clive's victory at Plassey, East India House lay at the heart of both the economy and governance of Britain, a monstrous combination of trader, banker, conqueror and power broker. It was from here that the 24 Directors guided the Company's commercial and increasingly political affairs, always with an eye to the share price; when Clive captured the French outpost of Chandernagore in Bengal in 1757, stocks rose by 12%. The share price moved higher still in the 1760s as investors fed hungrily on news of the apparently endless source of wealth that Bengal would provide. The Company was rapidly extending its reach from trade to the governance of whole provinces, using the taxes raised to pay for the imports of cloth and tea back to England.

In the wake of Enron and other scandals of the dot.com 1990s, the malpractice of many of the Company's key executives is sadly familiar: embedded corruption, insider trading and appalling corporate governance. In the process, a new class of 'nabobs' was created (a corruption of the Hindi word nawab). Clive obtained almost a quarter of a million pounds in the wake of Plassey, and told a House of Commons enquiry into suspected corruption that he was 'astounded' at his own moderation at not taking more. Thomas Pitt, Governor of Madras earlier in the century, used his fortune to sustain the political careers of his grandson and great-grandson, both of whom became Prime Minister. By the 1780s, about a tenth of the seats in Parliament were held by 'nabobs'. They inspired deep bitterness among aristocrats angry at the way they bought their way into high society. A few lone voices – such as the Quaker William Tuke – also pointed to the humanitarian disaster that the Company had wrought in India.

All these forces converged to create a new movement to regulate the Company's affairs. But so powerful was the Company's grip on British politics that attempts to control its affairs could bring down governments. In the early 1780s, a Whig alliance of Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke sought to place the Company's Indian possessions under Parliamentary rule. But their efforts were crushed by an unholy pact of Crown and Company. George III first dismissed the government and then forced a general election, which the Company funded to the hilt, securing a compliant Parliament.


Yet the case for reform was overwhelming, and the new Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger – that beneficiary of his great-grandfather's time in Madras – pushed through the landmark India Act of 1784. This transferred executive management of the Company's Indian affairs to a Board of Control, answerable to Parliament. In the final 70 years of its life, the Company would become less and less an independent commercial venture and more a sub-contracted administrator for the British state, a Georgian example of a 'public–private partnership'.

'Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India'

Edmund Burke, 1783 (1729–1797)

For centuries, the City of London has ruled itself from the fine mediaeval Guildhall. It was here in 1794 that the Mayor of London made the Governor-General of Bengal, Lord Cornwallis, an Honorary Freeman of the City, awarding him a gold medal in a gilded box. Cornwallis had certainly earned this prize from Britain's merchant class. He had defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore, extracting an eight-figure indemnity, and had just pushed through the 'permanent settlement' in Bengal, securing healthy tax revenues for the Company's shareholders. Seeking to increase the efficiency of tax collection in the Company's lands, Cornwallis cut through the complex patterns of mutual obligation that existed in the countryside and introduced an essentially English system of land tenure. At the stroke of a pen, the zamindars, a class of tax-farmers under the Mughals, were transformed into landlords. Bengal's 20 million smallholders were deprived of all hereditary rights. Two hundred years on, and after decades of land reform, the effects still live on in Bengal.

This 'permanent settlement' was simply a more systematic form of what had gone before. Just five years after the Company secured control over Bengal in 1765, revenues from the land tax had already tripled, beggaring the people. These conditions helped to turn one of Bengal's periodic droughts in 1769 into a full-blown famine. Today, the scale of the disaster inflicted on the people of Bengal is difficult to comprehend. An estimated 10 million people – or one-third of the population – died, transforming India's granary into a 'jungle inhabited only by wild beasts'. But rather than organise relief efforts to meet the needs of the starving, the Company actually increased tax collection during the famine [similar policies were applied again more than a hundred years later by the government of British India - see Present Hunger, Past Ghosts] . Many of its officials and traders privately exploited the situation; grain was seized by force from peasants and sold at inflated prices in the cities.

Even in good times the Company's exactions proved ruinous. The Company became feared for its brutal enforcement of its monopoly interests, particularly in the textile trade. Savage reprisals would be exacted against any weavers found selling cloth to other traders, and the Company was infamous for cutting off their thumbs to prevent them ever working again. In rural areas, almost two-thirds of a peasant's income would be devoured by land tax under the Company – compared with some 40% under the Mughals. In addition, punitive rates of tax were levied on essentials such as salt, cutting consumption in Bengal by half. The health impacts were cruel, increasing vulnerability to heat exhaustion and lowered resistance to cholera and other diseases, particularly amongst the poorest sections.

The Company's monopoly control over the production of opium had equally devastating consequences. Grown under Company eyes in Bengal, the opium was auctioned and then privately smuggled into China in increasing volumes. By 1828, opium sales in China were enough to pay for the entire purchase of tea, but at the cost of mass addiction, ruining millions of lives. When the Chinese tried to enforce its import ban, the British sent in the gunboats.

'The misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce'

William Bentinck, 1834

By this time, the Company's dual role as trader and governor was viewed as increasingly anachronistic – not least by the rising free trade lobby that despised its dominance. Eager to sell its cloth, in 1813, Britain's textile manufacturers forced the ending of the Company's monopoly of trade with India. The Company's commercial days were coming to a close. The final blow came in 1834 with the removal of all trading rights; its docks and warehouses (including those at Cutler Street) were sold off.

Technology, free trade and utilitarian ethics now came together in a powerful package to uplift the degraded people of India. But while the Company promoted a mission to make Indians 'useful and happy subjects', the twin pillars of Company rule remained the same: military and commercial conquest. By the 1850s, the budget for 'social uplift' was meager – while £15,000 was indeed made available for Indian schools, £5 million went to the military war chest.

The telegraph, steam ship and railway were introduced to accelerate access of British goods to Indian markets. The rapid influx of mill-made cloth shattered the village economy based on an integration of agriculture and domestic spinning, and the great textile capitals of Bengal. Between 1814 and 1835, British cotton cloth exported to India rose 51 times, while imports from India fell to a quarter. During the same period, the population of Dacca shrunk from 150,000 to 20,000. Even the Governor-General, William Bentinck, was forced to report that 'the misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.'
'Exterminate the Race'

Charles Dickens, 1857 (1812–1870)

Walk to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from St James' Park and you will go up 'Clive's steps', named after the statue of Robert Clive that stands without apology outside the old India Office buildings. It was here that the government transferred the administration of India in the wake of the disastrous 'mutiny' of 1857. Many explanations have been given for this uprising against Company rule in northern India, but the Company's increasing racial and administrative arrogance lay at the root.


Anglo-Indians were excluded from senior positions in the Company; non-European wives of the Company were forbidden to follow their husbands back to Britain. Verbal abuse mounted, with 'nigger' becoming a common expression for Indians. This slide into separatism also affected the Company's relations with its Indian soldiers, the sepoys. One by one, ties between the army and local communities were cut: Hindu and Muslim holy men were barred from blessing the sepoy regimental colours, and troops were stopped from participating in festival parades. As missionary presence grew, fears mounted that the Company was planning forcible conversion to Christianity.

All these sleights and apprehensions came to a head when sepoys in northern India rejected a new type of rifle cartridge, said to be greased with cow and/or pig fat. What turned a mutiny into a rebellion, however, was the Company's crass behaviour towards local rulers in Oudh, Cawnpore and Jhansi, who all turned against the Company as the soldiers rose. Symbolically, the first act of the mutineers at Meerut was to march the 36 miles to Delhi to claim the puppet Emperor Bahadur Shah as their leader.

The war, known simply as the 'Indian Mutiny', lasted for almost two years, and was characterised by extreme savagery on both sides. When the Company retook Cawnpore, where rebel troops had slaughtered European women and children, captured sepoys were made to lick the blood from the floors before being hanged. The reconquest of Delhi by the Company's troops was followed by systematic sacking, and the surviving inhabitants were turned out of its gates to starve. Bahadur's two sons and grandson were killed in cold blood, and the old Mughal was stripped of his powers and sent into exile in Rangoon.

Yet the Company that had grown in a symbiotic relationship with the Mughal Empire could not long survive its passing. The uprising itself and the massacres of Europeans had generated a ferocious bloodlust in British society. Even the mild-mannered Charles Dickens declared that 'I wish I were commander-in-chief in India [for] I would do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.' On 1 November 1858, a proclamation was read from every military cantonment in India: the East India Company was abolished and direct rule by Queen and Parliament was introduced. Firework displays followed the proclamation

The Company's legacy was quickly erased. East India House was demolished in 1861. India was no longer ruled from a City boardroom, but from the imperial elegance of Whitehall.

'Zakhm gardab gaya, lahu na thama'

('Though the wound is hidden, the blood does not cease to flow')

Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869)

Many would argue that the Company was no worse and in some respects somewhat better than other conquerors and rulers of India. What sets the Company apart, however, was the remorseless logic of its eternal search for profit, whether through trade, through taxation or through war. The Company was not just any other ruler. As a commercial venture, it could not and did not show pity during the Bengal famine of 1769–1770. Shareholder interests came first when it dispossessed Bengal's peasantry with its 'permanent settlement' of 1794. And the principles of laissez-faire ensured that its Governor-General would note the devastation of India's weavers in the face of British imports, and then do absolutely nothing.

Many institutions have justifiably disappeared into the anonymity of history. But in a country like Britain that is so drenched in the culture of heritage, the public invisibility of the East India Company is suspicious. Perhaps a single Hindi word can now help to explain this selective memory, this very British reticence: loot.

Nick Robins and the interdisciplinary group PLATFORM have created a critical walk through the London sites and monuments of the East India Company. For more information telephone PLATFORM 00 44 (0)20 7403 3738, or e-mail platform@gn.apc.org.

original article on open democracy

British Atrocities

Revolt and Revenge; a Double Tragedy

by V.S. "Amod" Saxena

Delivered to The Chicago Literary Club
February 17, 2003

The British called it the Sepoy's Mutiny. Indians called it their First War of Independence. Whatever the name, the uprising by the Indians and the soldiers of the East India Company was not an ordinary event. It was a widespread-armed revolt against a powerful and wealthy Company.

In 1857, the Sepoys broke discipline, took up arms and led a violent uprising against the English. The main cause given by the English historians is presence of greased cartridge in Enfield rifle. The Indians even today accuse the British of arrogance and a desire to rob them of their wealth, faith and political opinions. The event caused death, destruction and human tragedy of enormous proportions on both sides.

The English, with the recently chartered East India Company, arrived at the shores of India in 1600. At the time, the powerful Mughal ruled the country. Its empire was the largest land based empire in the world. It was rich and thriving. Within one hundred and fifty years, the administrative control of the country passed from the Mughal to the East India Company. In the process, the company became powerful and rich. It maintained a dominant military of several hundred thousand men to protect its holdings. By middle of the nineteenth century, the Company felt confident that in a country of 150 million people, it could protect its employees and political and financial interests.

The summer of 1857 changed all that.

In January of that year, small round Chapattis or flat Indian bread began to appear all over North India. Like a chain letter, the chapattis traveled in an area of about 200 miles around in a single day. The Indians sent messages hidden in each chapatti. This method of rapid communication competed directly with the telegraph, run by the Company. One of the messages buried in the chapattis read sub lal ho gaea hai meaning that all has become red. Red color signified the British rule as well as the symbol for blood. The English suspected that the messages carried warning of approaching disaster.

The morning of February 26, 1857 at Berhampore in Bengal, the 19th Native Infantry was on the parade ground for an exercise to fire the newly arrived Enfield rifles. The cartridges were blank and did not contain animal grease. When ordered to fire, the soldiers refused.

As a result, the officers arrested the soldiers and tried them for treason. They disbanded the regiment and sent them to prison for several years of hard labor. They also denied them pension and right to appeal their punishment. The disbanding of the soldiers from the regiment occurred in public. This did not go well with the soldiers and the public. Many soldiers had served the army for decades with valor and honor. Losing their benefits and worse their dignity angered the soldiers and the people of North India.

Mungal Pandey, proud and a sensitive man was a high caste Brahman. He served in the 34th Native Infantry. While participating in an exercise one day with loaded rifles, he suddenly broke away from his line. With out paying any attention he urged other soldiers to defy their superiors. He then pointed his gun at Lt. Baugh riding his horse. Pandey then fired his gun at his horse and brought it down. He then quickly struck the lieutenant with his sword. There were twenty Indian guards standing nearby. Only one of them came to help the officer, the rest just looked on in silence. This one soldier grabbed Mungal Pandey and held him down while the English officer escaped.

When another officer threatened to shoot the soldier with a revolver, Mungal Pandey turned the gun towards his own body and shot himself. Though wounded, he was immediately arrested. The evidence against Pandey revealed that he had acted alone and under the influence of marijuana and opium. However, he was found guilty of the treason and was hanged on April 8, 1857.

The sepoys were now getting restless and angry at the English. In spite of rampant rumors of the sepoys' discontent, the British refused to believe them. The bond of loyalty and affection that existed between the soldier and the officers seemed to be disappearing. Compounding this was a suspicion by most soldiers that the British were preparing to attack them and that they intended to disarm and dishonor them. There was reason to support the suspicion because the Company had requested a large reinforcement of troops from outside.

The soldiers were also upset about the punishment and disbanding of the 19th Native Infantry at Barrakpore. In fact, the 3rd cavalry did go to the jail where the soldier were kept and freed them. When the British officers arrived at the scene, the soldiers attacked them and killed one Colonel John Finnis. They then went on a shooting and killing rampage of several officers.

A large scale mutiny struck on May 10, 1857 at Meerut, a city about forty miles from Delhi. The soldiers continued to plan and communicate with each other while the English seemed demoralized and seemed incapable of dealing with the revolt.

The English tried to cool tempers and General Arson in Bengal made a public statement that greased cartridges would not be used anymore and instead balled ammunition shall be made up by each regiment for its use'.

The proclamation failed to calm the soldiers and an open rebellion continued. A cycle of violence and retribution between the soldiers and the British became a routine. Public executions of the sepoys became a common site.

On May 25, 1857 the Lieutenant Governor of North West Province tried to turn the tide by proclaiming; "Soldiers engaged in the late disturbances, who are desirous of going to their own homes, and who give up their arms at the nearest government civil or military post, and retire quietly, shall be permitted to do so unmolested. Many faithful soldiers have been driven into resistance to government only because they were in the ranks and could not escape from them, and because they really thought their feelings of religion and honour injured by the measures of government. This feeling was wholly a mistake; but it acted on men's minds. A proclamation of the governor general now issued is perfectly explicit, and will remove all doubts on these points. Every evil-minded instigator in the disturbance, and those guilty of heinous crimes against private persons, shall be punished. All those who appear in arms against the government after this notification is known shall be treated as an open enemy."

Company's Governor General Lord Canning did not like it. He demanded its immediate withdrawal. He felt that letting the soldiers go free would be tantamount to a pardon of murderers. The soldiers paid no attention to the controversy.

The mutiny now spread from the Afghanistan in the Northwest to the Burma border in east and from the Nepal border in the North to Nagpur in the south. This covered over fifty percent of area ruled by East India Company.

One of the most tragic incidents occurred in Cawnpore at the end of June. Cawnpore was an important and the largest garrison built by the British at the banks of River Ganges. General Hugh Massy Wheeler commanded the cantonment. It occupied the southern tip of the city. As a precaution, Wheeler had dug a wide ditch around the two large barracks. Ten nine-pounder cannons guarded the encampment. His English force was small in comparison to the Sepoys. He knew that if the Indians attacked, there would be no safety for his men and women. Nearest help was at Lucknow where his good friend Henry Lawrence was the Commanding Officer. Although only sixty miles away, it was cut off by an unfriendly population and resentful Indian soldiers.

Lucknow was also the capital of Oudh, a large territory ruled by a Mughal Nawab. The city was rich and well administered. Only a few years before, Wheeler himself had engineered a revolt against the Nawab resulting in an insurrection. The Company then reduced his power to a status of a puppet. It gave the Company rights to levy tax. This had angered the population and upset the Nawab. The news that Wheeler had requested reinforcement of more troops confirmed the fears of the sepoys and the people that British had ulterior motives on their

Wheeler spoke the local language and had adopted their customs. He had also married an Indian. He was thus confident that the Indians would attack his garrison.

He was wrong.

The attack came with vengeance on June 4, 1857. It was started by the 2nd Cavalry and soon followed by the three infantry divisions. There were a total of 3000 Indian soldiers to only 300 of the English. Wheelers two nine pounder guns were no match to nine twenty pounders of the rebels. The camp at the moment had about one thousand people mostly disabled men, women and children. Majority of them also included people of mixed blood who had come to the camp for protection. There were about one hundred and fifty sepoys who remained faithful to Wheeler. Continuous bombardment by the Sepoys disabled most of the carriages and destroyed the ammunitions inside the entrenchment. Wheeler wrote Lawrence: "British spirit alone remains but it can not last forever."

The camp was also running out of food and water. The wounded had problem being taken care of. The heat and flies made living conditions intolerable.

Governor Cannon had promised Wheeler a regiment of eight hundred British soldiers from Calcutta. It had not yet arrived and he had no idea when or if it would arrive. In his letter, he wrote; " The ladies, women and children have not a safe hole to lie down in and they all sleep in trenches for safety and coolness. The barracks are perforated are perforated in every direction, and cannot long give even the miserable shelter which they now do..."

With no help from his headquarter in Calcutta, Wheeler finally made a fateful decision and asked a prominent Indian citizen for his help in evacuating the camp to a safer place. The name of the Indian was Dhondu Pant. He was popularly known as Nana Sahib. He was influential and resourceful in the community. He was also on friendly terms with Wheeler and several other British.

However, Nana grudged the British for his own reasons. He was an adopted son of Bija Rao, a prominent Maratha ruler of a prominent state of Bithur. In 1851, the British dethroned the ruler by force and took over his state. They put him on a pension and when he died, they denied his adopted son Dhondu Pant an annuity which he claimed belonged to him. Nana lived near Cawnpore and resented the British for denying him his pension. He had fought long legal battle but lost his case in the Privy Council. Although on surface, he continued to entertain the English and was polite to them, he desired revenge against the British, if an opportunity arrived.

Nana agreed to help Wheeler evacuate the camp without any violence against its inhabitants. Nana also arranged several boats that would take the people down the river Ganges to Allahabad. It seemed a good and safe plan.

Nana thought that when the British were gone, the victorious sepoys would need a leader. He expected them to come to him for help. With their help and his own small army he could easily declare himself the ruler of the area. In his judgment, being a friend of the British was not in his best interest.

As expected, several regiments of the rebel army contacted Nana and asked him to join their rebellion. The Sepoys threatened to kill Nana if he declined to join them. This left Nana no choice but to agree to join them.

The evacuation of the camp proceeded peacefully. Nana's men arranged for the English to embark boats for their journey down the river to Allahabad. This area chosen by them was a small landing with steps leading to the river and was used by the people to bathe and pray in the holy Ganges. It was popularly known as Satichaura Ghat. The ghat was in a narrow ravine that led to the water edge where boats could be easily launched. The English were grateful to Nana for his kindness. The victims had suffered a great deal. They celebrated their good fortune as they embarked the boats.

The freedom did not last long.

As soon as they had boarded the boats, the sepoys suddenly appeared with their guns. They opened fire at the boats. Several men, women and children died in this shooting. Those few who had guns tried to return the fire but they were outnumbered and out gunned. A few escaped to tell their story but many died during the gunfire. Most boats caught fire and sank with passengers still on board. When a few attempted to escape by jumping off the boats, the Sepoys chased and shot them at close range. Those who reached the river bank were gunned down too. The river turned red with blood and was full of floating bodies.

General Wheeler was also killed in this violence.

About one hundred and twenty five women and children survived the bloodbath. Although, the British later accused Nana of betrayal and murder of innocent people, no evidence has ever been found to prove it. On hearing about the news of shooting Nana sent his own troops to bring the survivors to safety. He ordered his men to take the women and children to one of his houses called Bibighar, a house meant for women. It was large but not large enough for so many people.

Soon another group of about eighty English women and children joined victims of Satichaura bloodshed. The rebels had captured them in another town and had brought them to Nana Sahib as captives. There were now over two hundred women and children inside this house. Bibighar proved utterly small and crammed. It was barely furnished with a few pieces of furniture and a few bamboo mats for people to lie down. For the English women, the summer heat and high humidity made their life intolerable.

After the rebels defeated the Wheeler's regiment, Nana saw a chance he had been waiting for. He declared himself the Maharaja of Bithur, his ancestral title. He now had the title that the Company denied him for so long.

Little did he know that two strong English armies led by General Henry Havelock and General James Neill were moving towards Cawnpore to attack Nana's forces.

Back at the Bibighar, Nana's people had appointed a prostitute Hussaini Begum to take charge of the prisoner's daily activities. The Begum was harsh and stern. She put them to hard labor of grinding corn for chapattis. The meager ration included chapatti and dhal or thin lentil soup.

Hard labor and poor sanitary conditions at Bibighar soon began to take its toll. The death toll from cholera and dysentery rose at an alarming rate. The deaths at Bibighar and advancing troops towards Cawnpore alarmed Nana and his advisors. His spies reported that the British troops led by Havelock and Neill were committing grotesque and indiscriminate slaughter of several hundred villagers. The prisoners at Bibighar now posed a burden for Nana's advisors. They also offered an opportunity to take revenge for the murders of civilians by the advancing British troops. To do away with the prisoners would also ensure their silence as witness to the massacre at the Ghat.

Nana himself had not planned to harm the prisoners at Bibighar but his advisors and the rebel sepoys over ruled him. A few amongst Nana's advisors had already decided to kill the prisoners at Bibighar; " even one European remained alive he would continue to be a thorn in his flesh"; one advised Nana. The women of Nana's household, however, opposed the decision and went on hunger strike but failed to convince the men around him.

It is not certain who finally gave the orders but the fate of the prisoners was sealed. They must be killed before the advancing troops reached Cawnpore, they decided. As the evening wore off on the July 15, the sepoys entered Bibighar and tried to drag them out of the house. The women grasped the pillars of the verandah and refused to move. Unable to move them the Sepoys fired volleys of shots at them. Wounded but still adamant to move, the prisoners clung to each other. Finally, Sarvir Khan, a tall Pathan from Afghanistan walked in with four butchers. They were armed with long swords. They began to swing them wildly at the victims. After almost two hours, the sword-dance of the butchers stopped and the place became silent.

The sun had already set and it was dark now. The five attackers walked towards the exit, stepping on the dead bodies. The sweat of hard work of committing violence made their hands, arms and naked trunk glistened in the dim light of the burning lamps outside. They silently went home to their families after a job.

Next day early in the morning, thousands of local citizens gathered around Bibighar to view the carnage. They could see the bodies of the victims at a close range, piled one over the other in a heap at the far wall of the room.

The burial party now arrived to dispose off the bodies. Half buried in the heap were four women who were still alive. They found four women and some children still alive. As soon as the women saw the men they got up and ran towards a well outside in the court yard of Bibighar. All women one by one jumped in to the well to their death. A few children also followed them in to the well. Those who escaped were immediately killed.

The burial party now re-entered the house and began to clear the place of the dead. They found it hard to dispose off the bodies in a short time. They decided then to dump all the bodies in a large fifty feet deep well situated in the courtyard.

Thus the job of disposing the dead done, the burial party departed for their respective homes completely tired. Immediately, the crowed that had gathered at Bibighar began to disperse quietly.

The city now seemed to be in a state of heightened but quiet tension. Nana's spies, in the meanwhile, returned from their mission brought the news of a large British reinforcement near by. According to them, Generals Havelock was leading a large force and that General Neill was in the march. They also found out that the English troops had defeated rebel forces in Fatehpur, a city near Cawnpore. The fighting was fierce and that there were a large number of death and injury on both sides. The victors retaliated against the civilians by sacking villages, raping women, killing children and hanging hundreds of men. When the people of Cawnpore heard this, they feared similar retaliation against them. They quickly started a rapid evacuation of cities citizens.

Finally, Havelock's troops arrived. They had walked and fought their way without rest or sleep. They were tired and hungry. They found out about the deaths at the Satichaura Ghat and the murders at Bibighar. As soon as they arrived in the city, they threw down the rebel flag flying over the police station and installed the Union Jack. Sherer and Bews, the forward officers tried to calm the citizens and asked for assistance.

The people did not believe them. They had heard about the horrible atrocities inflicted on the innocent villagers.

When Shere told Havelock about the dead bodies in the well, he was very shocked. He was sitting quietly pondering over loss of his own men the day before in a fierce battle with the rebels. He ordered Shere to fill the well immediately with dirt to stop the stench so that the nature would take its course and give them a burial without further indignities.

A fierce fighting broke out between the rebel soldiers and the British troops. Finally, the English defeated the sepoys. When the English soldiers saw the well filled with dead bodies of women and children, they became and with rage and hatred. It did not matter that they had done their own share of atrocities on their way to Cawnpore. Now they were the victors and they found a justification for further revenge.

One soldier who came out of the massacre site vowed; "I have spared many a man in fight, but I will never spare another. I shall carry this with me in my holsters, and whenever I am inclined for mercy, the sight of it, and the recollection of this house, will be sufficient to incite me to revenge."

For the rebels and the civilians, the worst was yet to come. The atrocities against the Indian civilians had already begun even before the English reached Cawnpore.

At Fatehgarh, for example, when the English defeated the enemy, their officers ordered a mass scale killing the rebels and the citizens on the spot. General Neill had also organized Hanging parties'. The parties made daily rounds to seek out those that they believed had participated in the rebellion. This in practice meant whatever the English thought of their victim. No evidence was sought and none given before executing the victim. Even a slightest defiance by a person meant immediate death. A description by a soldier of the 78th Highlanders tells the story of one of such expedition:

"We shouted that he was a sepoy, and to seize him. He was taken and about twelve more. We came back to the carts on the road, and an old man came to us, and wanted to be paid for the village we had burned. We had a magistrate with us, who found he had been harbouring the villains and giving them arms and food. Five minutes settled it; the sepoy and the man that wanted the money were taken to the roadside, hanged to a branch of a tree We came to the village and set it in fire. The sun came out, and we got dry, but soon we got wet again with sweat. We came to a large village and it was full of people. We took about 200 of them out, and set fire to it. I saw an old man trying to trail out a bed .I saw the flames bursting out of a house , and, to my surprise, observed a little boy, about four years old, looking out at the door. I pointed the way out to the old man and told him if he did not go I would shoot him."

When the Highlanders moved to another village, they caught about 140 men, women and children. They selected sixty men from the group, forced them to build the gallows of wooden logs taken from the burning homes. They then chose ten men of the group hanged them without any evidence or trial. For others, they had reserved flogging and beating to teach them a lesson. The women and children; " all crying and lamenting what had been done Oh, if you seen the ten march round the grove, and seen them looking the same as if nothing was going to happen to them! There was one of them fell; the rope broke, and down he came. He rose up, looked all around; he was hung up again"; an account given by one of the soldiers.

At one of the villages, about two thousand villagers armed only with their lathis, wooden cane stood turned out in protest. They stood up to face the Highlanders. The British troops surrounded them and set their village on fire. The villagers were trapped with fire all around them. The villagers trying to escape were shot to death. One soldier describes the incident thus; " We took eighteen of them prisoners; they were all tied together, and we fired a volley at them and shot them on the spot".

General Neill had another plan also. On his marching map, he marked those villages that he chose for special treatment. The soldiers would loot, burn and kill the inhabitants of villages without mercy.

In his book, "Our Bones Are Scattered" Andrew Ward writes: "Neill appointed commissioners to oversee the retribution, including one particularly homicidal civilian who on June 28 boasted that we have the power of life and death in our hands, and I assure you we spare not.' Each day he had strung up eight and ten men' and after a summary trial' each prisoner was' placed under a tree with rope around his neck, on the top of a carriage; and when it is pulled away, off he swings "

Stringing and shooting the men in front of their family was a sport the troops enjoyed. Watching women stooping and begging for the lives of their men seemed to thrill the young soldiers and their officers.

The prisoners were made to stand under the hot summer sun for hours till they fainted. It was easy to flog them when they were half conscience, otherwise, they would squirm and make it hard to strike. Flogging invariably ended in killing of the victims.

The English wanted to break the faith of their Hindu and Moslem prisoners. The prisoners accused of evenly remotely participating in revolt had to crawl on their four limbs, lick the blood off the floor and forced to eat beef and pork before being executed. The beef eating was reserved for Hindus and pork meat for the Moslems before their execution.

Cannon-shows were announced to a whole village. Here, a prisoner would be tied to the mouth of cannon. The cannon would then be fired blowing the poor man to pieces. Small bits of flesh mixed with fresh blood exploding in the air made a spectacular show. The next prisoner was forced to pick the flesh pieces from the ground, clean the cannon before he was tied to the cannon mouth. In several cases, a victim would be flogged before being sewn alive in pigskin and be left in the sun to die of asphyxiation and heat. Such punishment was meant to demonstrate the military power of the British and to instill fear in the minds of the public.

The revenge killings went on for several weeks. The Indians now convinced themselves that it all proved their earlier suspicion that the English came to India not to trade but destroy their faith. According to Lawrence James: "The laws of evidence were suspended, age and sex ignored, and those who carried out the killings were proud of their deeds, which they justified as revenge for the atrocities at Meerut and Delhi."

Soldiers and officers writing to their families in England used phrases like; "Lots of blackguards are hanged every morning The more the merrier I am delighted to see that good folks at home hate the Pandies almost as much as we do You say Delhi ought to be thoroughly destroyed. We all say the same. Some 300 or 400 were shot yesterday There are several mosques in the city most beautiful to look at. But I should like to see them all destroyed. The rascally brutes desecrated our churches and graveyards and I do not think we ought to have any regard for their religion." " to my certain knowledge many soldiers of the English regiments got possession of jewellary and gold ornaments taken from the bodies of the slain city inhabitants, and I was shown by men of my regiment strings of pearl and gold mohur which had fallen into their hands That many of provate soldiers of my regiment succeeded in acquiring a great quantity of valuable plunder was fully demonstrted soon after our return to England."

Both Indians and the British troops participated in extensive looting, robbing and stealing as well as exhorting money and property from wealthier citizens. However, the English were more systematic and organized in their approach towards this.. According to one English soldier;

" . they shut him up in a dark celler and fired pistols over his head until he got into such a state of alarm that he told them where they could find Rs. 50,000 of his own and Rs. 40,000 of a friend of his The next day they got hold of another corpolent nigger, who however was upto the dodge of the pistols, and did not even care about knives being thrown all around him .so they loaded a pistol before his eyes, and sent the bullet through his turban, which he thought was getting beyond a joke, so he divulged the whereabouts of Rs. 40,000."

No end to the bloodshed of the Indians seemed in sight. Lawrence from Punjab finally wrote to General Penny, the Commander in Delhi;

"I wish I could induce you to interfere in this matter. I believe we shall lastingly, and , indeed, justly be abused for the way in which we have despoiled all classes without distinction I have even heard, though it seems incredible, that officers have gone about and murdered, natives in cold blood. You may depend upon it we cannot allow such acts to pass unnoticed. If we have no higher motives, the common dictates of policy should make us refrain from such outrages Unless we endevour to distinguish friend from foe, we shall unite all classes against us."

In spite of Lawrence's call for restrain, the killings, and looting continued for several more weeks. Hundreds of citizens were shot, hanged or killed by the sword while the English smoked their cigars'. On several occasions, the British soldiers bribed the executioners to keep the noose lose enough for the victims to go slowly towards their death. The English called slow dangling of the body on a rope, the "Pandies' hornpipe" thus describing a dying man's struggle on the rope that resembled a hornpipe. It reminded the English of a spirited fifteenth century folkdance accompanied by the hornpipe, popular in the nineteenth century Britain.

On November 1, 1858, the peace was declared by the Governor General of India. The British Government abolished the East India Company and took over the reigns of India's administration. The Queen's proclamation also declared that all rebels would be pardoned if they had not murdered any Europeans and that the religious tolerance would be respected.

One hundred and forty five years have passed since the revolt was suppressed. Indians have asked the question "What were the English doing in India in the first place and why did the Indians allow themselves to be treated in such a manner?" The answers are hard to come by. It seems certain that the causes of mutiny were several.

By 1850s, the Indians had become deeply dependent upon the East India Company for their security and economic wellbeing. It controlled the internal and external trade and affected its economy. The rapid decline of the Mughal Empire resulted in a power vacuum that the British were lucky enough to exploit.

Although the Mughal Empire created one of the strongest and most powerful kingdoms in the world, it remained a land based and isolated. This was in contrast with the British who had just defeated the Russians in Crimean War and had sowed the seeds of building an Empire that would control forty percent of the globe and all sea-lanes. They were the prime naval power.

The rulers of various Indian states never understood changes occurring outside their own world. Arguments, dissentions and divisions between them over succession, division of boundaries and control of weaker states by the stronger ones made them target of East India Company. The Company took advantage of the opportunity. Thus, the East India Company won the day by playing politics, deceit, chutzpah and sheer luck.

During the initial years of the Company's involvement in India, each ruler raised his own army to protect itself from external and internal attacks. Once the Company controlled the subcontinent, the need for multiple armies receded. The Company became the main employer. The competition in hiring the Sepoys disappeared. It became a monopoly in recruiting its military needs. It set the price, the pay, the benefits and conditions of service. The potential soldier and the Sepoy lost his bargaining power. Once this happened in favor of the Company, the soldiers became disenchanted and helpless. In this they were no different than the lettuce growers of California before Chavez organized them.

By 1850s, the English had over 300,000 strong Indian men in uniform. The Company had only 30,000 English soldiers but in command over the Indian soldiers,

In the beginning, the relationship between the Indians and the English was cordial and respectful. The English dressed and ate with the Indians. They learnt the local language and adopted local customs.

All this changed by the middle of the nineteenth century. Average Englishman became more educated and increased their standard of living the Indian standard of living declined. The Company opened special schools in England to train young men for the Company services. These young men were different culturally and were brash. At the same time the Company allowed young women to follow the men. Intermingling between the Indians and English began to be discouraged. The cordial and understanding relationship between the English officers and the Indian soldier declined. Sita Ram Pandey a Brahmin soldier of high cast describes these feelings:

"In those days the sahibs could speak our language much better than they do now, and they mixed more with us. Although officers today have to pass the language examination, and have to read books, they do not understand our language . The only language they learn is that of lower orders, which they pick up from their servants, and which is unsuitable to be used in polite conversation."

Most British officers hardly noticed an Indian face even though they were surrounded by them. When they did notice, it was to abuse them. These abuses included calling insulting names and swearing. One British resident in India once wrote:

" the sepoy is regarded as an inferior creature. He is sworn at. He is treated roughly. He is spoken as nigger'. He is addressed as suar' or pig, epithet most opprobrious to a respectable native, especially the Mussalman, and which cuts him to the quick. The old (officers) are less guilty But the younger men seem to regard it as an excellent joke, as an evidence of spirit and praiseworthy sense of superiority over the sepoy to treat him as an inferior animal."

Several dozen servants or "Khitmutgar" meaning "the one who serves" served an Englishman regardless of his position in his own society. An English household had the Khansaama', for his the kitchen a Mali' for his garden, an Ayah, to nurse his children and multitude of other servants to do things that an Englishman loathed to do him. He hardly raised a finger for all his comfort, little or large.

The English masters demanded complete loyalty from their servants. These servants were beaten and abused on the slightest mistake.

The treatment of Sepoy was not much different. By 1850's the relationship of the English officers and the sepoy was that of a ruler and the ruled. A common belief among the local population that the English had no respects or regards for the people's religion, culture or local customs created even more resentment.

Indians felt; "Who were the Feringhis or the foreigners to tell them how they wanted to live their lives?" For the Moslems it was even more insulting. For over eight centuries, they ruled the Indian subcontinent. They felt cheated and deprived.

The Company control of the country brought a horde of Christian Missionaries to India. Their mission was to "Civilize" the Godless. The Indians resented their presence. Just before the mutiny, the Company administration actively participated in conversion of local population to Christianity of those, they captured as prisoners and those who they employed. The Company freely distributed copies of the Bible as an inducement to the prisoners who were at its mercy. Even worse was a practice by the Company to require that all Moslem prisoners must shave off their beard. For a Moslem shaving, his beard is blasphemous.

In the hospitals the English doctors, nurses and administrators confined men, women and children in the same ward regardless of their feelings. According the Hibberrt, a Subedar named Hedayet Ali laments that "the intention of the British (was) to take away the dignity and honour of all."

The resentment stayed bottled up and in 1857; then it exploded. The grease in the cartridge provided the spark. The mutiny surprised and shocked the English and caught him unawares. To the Indian it was not a surprise. The massacre at Bibighar was a heinous crime, no doubt. It occurred because the sepoys and the people heard of the atrocities by the soldiers of the 78th Highlanders under Havelock and Neills on their way to Cawnpore. Both the English and the Indians lacked maturity and dispassion. They took their gloves off and proceeded to kill each other with no mercy-one in revolt and the other in revenge.

The discipline in the British army broke down completely after their victory at Cawnpore. Freely available liquor at Nana's warehouse acted as the fuel to the fire. The English soldiers got drunk and lost their sense of right and wrong. They went on a rampage, broke down the godowns, looted them, and drank liquor to their hearts content.

To this day, the English and Indians have their own version of the gory event. Both defend their points of view evoking strong emotions.

The British were very proud of their Indian dominion. They convinced themselves that Indians would be grateful of the English rule. There is a little story that has made rounds in social gatherings and told by P.J.O Taylor in his book A Star Shall Fall. It goes like this; "An English superior once asked an Indian subordinate was he not glad to be under the rule of Queen Victoria.' He seemed to have hesitated, but when pressed, asked to be excused a direct reply, but would the Sahib please listen to a little Indian tale?"

"This was the tale.

"There was once a washerman who owned a donkey. Every day he loaded up the beast with very heavy bundles of dirty clothing and drove him down to the edge of the river. There the donkey was hobbled and left to scratch a poor feed from the sparse dry grass on the river bank. The washerman meanwhile would join his fellows in the shallows and wash the clothing they had brought"

"One day a thief crept up and un-hobbled the donkey and led it away. Hours later the washerman discovered his loss, and with help of villagers tracked down the donkey: the thief fled and was caught. The washerman was very angry, and took out his displeasure on the donkey, saying you stupid animal, why did you not bray and call me? I would have come running atonce!' The donkey replied why should I be pleased either to stay with one master or go with another? Am I to be better treated and better fed with one rather than the other? The only improvement for me would be to have no master at all."

Bibliography


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