Silent Boys

17/01/2018

19/08/2017

23/04/2017

Vidurashwatha is known as the "Jallianwala Bagh of the South".

On April 25, 1938, as a part of the freedom struggle of India, a group of villagers had congregated to organise a Satyagraha. Similar to what happened at Jallianwala Bagh, police fired indiscriminately at the group, resulting in the death of around 35 people. A memorial has been erected in this location bearing the names of those who lost their lives in this incident.

13/04/2017

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, while attending the play Our American Cousinat Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., as theAmerican Civil War was drawing to a close. The assassination occurred five days after the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, General Robert E. Lee,surrendered to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant and the Union Army of the Potomac

Lincoln was the third American president to die in office, and the first to be murdered. An unsuccessful attempt had been made onAndrew Jackson 30 years prior, in 1835, and Lincoln had himself been the subject of an earlier assassination attempt by an unknown assailant in August 1864. The assassination of Lincoln was planned and carried out by the well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth, as part of a larger conspiracy in a bid to revive the Confederate cause.

As the President was watching the play, Booth shot Lincoln from behind at a distance of perhaps three or four feet, hitting him in the back of the head. At 7:22 a.m. the following day, Lincoln died in the Petersen House across the street from the theater. The rest of the conspirators' plot failed; Powell only managed to wound Seward, while Atzerodt, Johnson's would-be assassin, lost his nerve and fled. Booth made a dramatic escape, resulting in a lengthy manhunt that ended in his death. Several other conspirators were later tried and hanged. The funeral and burial of Abraham Lincoln was a period of extended national mourning.

13/04/2017

13/04/2017

Jallianwala Bagh massacre

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also known as the Amritsar massacre, took place on 13 April 1919 when a crowd of nonviolent protesters, along with Baishakhi pilgrims, who had gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar,Punjab, were fired upon by troops of the British Indian Army under the command of Colonel Reginald Dyer. The civilians had assembled to participate in the annualBaisakhi celebrations, a religious and cultural festival for Punjabi people. Coming from outside the city, they may have been unaware of the imposition of martial law.

The Jallianwalla Bagh is a public garden of 6 to 7 acres (28,000 m2), walled on all sides with five entrances. On Dyer's orders, his troops fired on the crowd for ten minutes, directing their bullets largely towards the few open gates through which people were trying to flee. The British government released figures stating 379 dead and 1,200 wounded. Other sources place the number of dead at well over 1,000. This "brutality stunned the entire nation", resulting in a "wrenching loss of faith" of the general public in the intentions of the UK.
The ineffective inquiry and the initial accolades for Dyer by the House of Lords fuelled widespread anger, leading to the Non-cooperation Movement of 1920–22.

On Sunday, 13 April 1919, Dyer was convinced of a major insurrection and he banned all meetings; however this notice was not widely disseminated. That was the day of Baisakhi, the main Sikh festival, and many villagers had gathered in the Bagh. On hearing that a meeting had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer went with fifty Gurkha troops to a raised bank and ordered them to shoot at the crowd. Dyer continued the firing for about ten minutes, until the ammunition supply was almost exhausted. Dyer stated that 1,650 rounds had been fired, a number apparently derived by counting empty cartridge cases picked up by the troops. Official British Indian sources gave a figure of 379 identified dead, with approximately 1,100 wounded.
The casualty number estimated by the Indian National Congress was more than 1,500, with approximately 1,000 dead.

The massacre caused a re-evaluation of the army's role, in which the new policy became minimum force. The army was retrained and developed less violent tactics for crowd control. Some historians consider the episode a decisive step towards the end of British rule in India.

On 13 March 1940, at Caxton Hall in London,Udham Singh, an Indian independence activist from Sunam who had witnessed the events in Amritsar and was himself wounded, shot and killed Michael O'Dwyer, the British Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab at the time of the massacre, who had approved Dyer's action and was believed to be the main planner. Dyer himself had died in 1927.