Gujranwala, Where British PM Sunak’s Ancestors Witnessed an Orgy of Colonial Violence

Rishi Sunak’s ancestors were born in a Punjabi town that was savagely attacked by British colonial forces, leaving at least nine dead and 27 others wounded, according to official colonial sources. Indians at the time said the true rate of casualties was substantially higher.

The British Prime Minister’s paternal grandfather, Ram Das Sunak, was only two years old when White-led police, soldiers and pilots participated in a two-day orgy of violence against unarmed Indian civilians in his home town of Gujranwala, 60 miles north of Amritsar and Lahore, with an estimated population of 30,000.

Three aircraft sent from a Royal Air Force base in Lahore were used to drop bombs, and machine gun unarmed civilians, including young children, at the Khalsa High School Boarding House, Gujranwala town centre and nearby villages.

Pictures of the now derelict Sunak family home, abandoned after Partition, are accessible on the Internet. The property is only a short distance away from the town centre and the school that came under fire.

Surviving records confirm how 10 bombs and 1000 rounds of machine gun fire were directed at their Indian targets. One bomb was deliberately dropped on the school.

Surviving photographs of the era include the picture of an 11-year old boy, named Sardari Lal, who had his left arm amputated. Other victims of the attacks were not named or compensated.

Baby Ram Das Sunak, together with his immediate family, friends and neighbours, were all inevitable witnesses to these colonial atrocities of April 14 and 15, 1919, when police, army and air force units were despatched to tackle civilian protestors responding to the horrifying Jallianwalla Bagh massacre in nearby Amritsar.

The well documented Jallianwalla Bagh tragedy predates Gujranwala, and highlights how brutal colonial tactics were repeatedly used to suppress ‘insubordinate’ Indians daring to defy their British rulers.

At least 400 Indian men, women and children were killed, and another 1000 wounded on April 13, 1919, in Jallianwalla Bagh when they ignored military orders and gathered to celebrate the Spring festival of Vaisakhi. This Jallianwalla Bagh tragedy predates and inevitably overshadows what happened in Gujranwala.

As Jallianwalla Bagh dominated the headlines, less attention was paid to the terrified families of Gujranwala, although their sufferings 24 hours later, did attract the attention of the government-sponsored Hunter Committee that was eventually set up six months later to investigate the disturbances in Punjab and other provinces.

Revisiting the Hunter Committee’s findings in British government archives reveals it came out in two sections. A majority report made up of white only members was circumspect in its findings about Gujranwala. The minority report made up of two Hindus and one Muslim was both more detailed and more damning of both Gujranwala and Amritsar.

Authors of the minority report were prominent lawyers Sahibzada Sultan Ahmad Khan,Sir C.H. Setalvad and Pandit Jagat Narayan who was also a member of the UP Legislative Council.

Both majority and minority report members paid particular attention to army commander Brigadier Rex Dyer, the officer in charge of the Amritsar shootings and backed by Punjab’s Lieutenant Governor, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who subsequently commented, “The Amritsar business cleared the air, and if there was to be a holocaust anywhere, and one regrets that there should be, it was best at Amritsar.”

Reports of the cold-blooded Amritsar killings spread like wildfire throughout the Punjab with protests erupting in numerous local towns and villages. The terrifying violence with which the authorities responded to these widespread protests in April 1919 included tactics aimed at humiliating Indians.

They included public executions, floggings, jail terms and so-called ‘fancy punishments’ such as the infamous ‘crawling order’ that required Indians to crawl on all fours whenever they encountered Europeans.

The ‘crawling order’ was the personal inspiration of General Dyer. He also sanctioned many other ritual humiliations. For example any Indians who failed to salute Europeans in the street were forced to skip with a rope or rub their noses in the dirt.

‘The Proudest Day’, authored by the late Anthony Read and David Fisher, records how in the village of Kasur a Captain Doveton, one of Dyer’s junior officers, had members of a wedding party publicly whipped because they were more than 10 and therefore, in his eyes, made up an illegal gathering.

Collective fines were imposed on key villages near Gujranwala and failure to pay resulted in the blocking of wells that were the only source of local drinking water. Elsewhere a civil servant named as Bosworth Smith specialised in ripping off women’s veils before spitting on them and calling them ‘flies, bitches, she-asses and swine.’

How any surviving Indians in Gujranwala and its precincts managed to retain their sanity is remarkable. It was small comfort for victims and their supporters that they managed to avoid even more draconian punishments like the castrations imposed on Kenyan resistance fighters in East Africa.

Details of colonial atrocities unleashed in Gujranwala on April 14 and 15, 1919, include repeated aerial bombings and machine gun strafings.

War crimes should have been the least of the indictments levelled at those white British pilots who dropped bombs and fired their machine guns at Gujranwala’s Khalsa High School, town centre and nearby fields and villages. Ironically, young Punjabis from these same towns and villages were recruited in their thousands to fight for the British

in the First World War.

The Sunak family home is only a short distance from the town centre and high school. Sohag Rani, Ram Das’ future wife and Rishi’s paternal grandmother, was born seven months after the atrocities. Her family also lived close by.

Members of both families, along with their friends and neighbours, could not avoid the impact of the firing. In 1935, when he was 18, Ram Das left for Kenya in search of a better life. His young wife, Suhag Rani, followed him two years later. The couple had six children and one of them, Yashvir, is Rishi Sunak’s father.

The Hunter Committee Minority Report, accessible in London’s British Library, details how three Royal Air Force BE2c biplanes summoned from an air base in Lahore hovered 200 feet in the air before attacking their selected Gujranwala targets.

One bomb was dropped on the Khalsa High School that also endured 30 rounds of machine gun fire.

Pilots named by the Hunter Committee Minority Report were Major Douglas Carberry, Second Lieutenant Vincent and Lieutenant Dodkins. It was Carberry who bombed and machine gunned the High School, whereas Vincent fired 700 rounds at farmers and their families in outlying villages.

Dodkins told the committee how he dropped a bomb and used his Lewis machine gun, first to fire at 20 farmers standing and talking to each other in a field, then unleashed another round of machine gun fire at 30-50 people standing by the door of a house.

When asked by the committee to justify his firing, Dodkins responded, “My orders were to disperse any crowd and that gathering of 20 people was a crowd and so I dispersed them.”

Carberry, the lead pilot who bombed and machine gunned the High School and other targets, was even more shameless in his testimony before the Hunter Committee. “I could not discriminate between innocent and other people who were, I think, doing damage or were going to do damage.” explaining his attacks on civilian targets, he added, “I was trying to do this in their own interests. If I killed a few people, they would not gather and come to Gujranwala to do

damage.”

Carberry, Vincent and Dodkins all avoided censure. Ambala-born Carberry was eventually promoted to the rank of Brigadier. He died in 1959. Like all the other military officers and civil servants who approved the Amritsar and Gujranwala killings they were protected from prosecution in Indian courts because of a 1919 Law of Indemnity hurriedly approved by the colonial government.

Rishi Sunak is justly proud to be the first ever British Prime Minister of Indian origin and his Indian, Hindu heritage was underlined when he swore his oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita. But he has avoided any discussion of how British officials unleashed a reign of terror on his paternal grandfather’s home town in the Punjab.

Nor has the British Prime Minister taken part in any discussions about how surviving Indians and their families should be recompensed for the sufferings they endured during 200 years of British colonial rule. No Indian has ever been compensated.

Downing Street was invited to comment, but Sunak’s Press advisers say they never respond to queries about the Prime Minister’s personal relations and background.

By way of comparison, however, Black Kenyan victims of colonial misrule, including survivors of castration, have so far managed to win more than £19 million in compensation from the British government.

Prime Minister Sunak remains silent as well in the ongoing debate about why the UK holds on to the priceless valuables systematically looted by colonial officials who served in India. ‘The Guardian’ newspaper in London revealed earlier this month how so many of these valuables extracted from India as trophies of conquest, including the famous Kohinoor diamond, ended up as the personal property of the British royal family.

Colonial compensation has not been an issue so far in the currently deadlocked trade talks between London and New Delhi. India wants the British government to take action against UK-based Sikh separatists, including those who recently participated in a violent demonstration outside the Indian high commission in London, demanding an independent Sikh state of Khalistan.

Local Sikh support will be vital for Sunak's Conservative government as it prepares for next year's general election. For other voters of Indian heritage the Sikh demands for independence are the least of the colonial legacies that need to be addressed and the Sunaks of Gujranwala are a living reminder of the UK’s troubled past.

Cover Photograph: Associated Press released this photograph earlier of a motorbike parked in a narrow alley of Machli Bazar area, where Britain's new prime minister Rishi Sunak's paternal grandfather Ramdas Sunak reportedly lived, in Gujranwala, Pakistan. This could not be independently verified by The Citizen.

Shyam Bhatia is a senior independent journalist based in the UK.