1st January 1948: Jallianwala Bagh of independent India

As India welcomed freedom on January 1, 1948, some sixty kilometres from the steel city of Jamshedpur, in the tribal town of Kharsawan, a tragic event was written. The incident is recalled as the "Jallianwala Bagh Kand of independent India," as five months have not yet completed the count since the freedom dawned.

The day the incident occurred was the Kharsawan weekly market, and a gathering of almost fifty thousand tribals who were protesting against turning their area into a police cantonment were fired upon by the Odisha Military Police. It turned out to be the very first major incident of violence after independence, in which too many people were claimed to have been killed.

Senior journalist Anuj Kumar Sinha has a book on this entire tragedy, "Jharkhand Andolan Ke Dastavez: Shoshan, Sangharsh Aur Shahadat." He stated before his interview ended, "There are very few documents available about the number of people killed. According to memoirs of former MP and Maharaja P.K. Dev, around two thousand people lost their lives in this incident."

The errors in the reports become evident here—three days into the incident, The Statesman, an English daily from Kolkata, came out with a report titled "35 Adivasis Killed in Kharsawan." The report said the police opened fire on thirty thousand tribals protesting against the merger of Kharsawan with Odisha, due to which a tribunal was set up to probe the incidence. But what the tribunal has said was not to be known.

The consequence of the incident being mass burial, it was done near a big well in which the corpses were not only thrown but the injured people also. Bahadur Uraon is a Jharkhand activist and a former legislator who was roughly eight when the incident happened, and he took up the movement later in his life for the demand of a separate Jharkhand state.

Uraon writes that the conflict originated due to a requisition for a separate Jharkhand state, as the nature of the tribes in the locality was averse to amalgamation with Odisha or Bihar. The situation went out of hand during a rally organized by Jaypal Singh Munda, who was demanding a separate Jharkhand. The police entered straight into the site of the people, gunshots resonating in that confusion, rendering huge casualties. Many years later, the well near the martyr's site served as a grim reminder of the tragic day.

Another witness who narrated about the incident was Rajab Ali. He emphasized the use of machine guns to draw lines that no one could pass through in order to go closer to the king's palace. According to these reports in the newspapers, the tribals attacked first by using arrows. The police retaliated by shooting. The sound of guns brought the bystanders slowly relieving the scene.

Subsequently, martial law was invoked in the region, perhaps for the first time in independent India. The government made attempts to distribute clothes in the affected areas, but pronouncement of the tribals refused to accept the same on the ground that they will not accept clothes from the government that fired upon them.

The Kharsawan incident is one such poignantly overlooked chapter in the struggle of Indians for their right to determine their destiny. At Kharsawan on that fateful day of 1948, the event needs to be revisited and recognized for the conflict of narratives and vacuum of a proper investigation into the incident.