Crowd Control — A Thought Experiment

Dattaprasad Godbole
2 min readAug 2, 2018

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Credit: Anthony Franklin

Imagine you are ruling a special state. Its civil liberties are limited. And, although you’re ruling it, locals consider you as an outsider. The people are unhappy with your rule and protests are routine.

There’s a woman from your community who reaches under-privileged children. One day, the atmosphere becomes tense so she sends children back home. While returning home, she’s caught by a mob, then undressed, kicked, and beaten up. There is a huge outrage in the central administration. And the whole state is put under the martial law. Right to assembly has been withdrawn.

You make sure the place where the woman as assaulted, every person from that community crawls. You remind them that woman’s dignity is sacred. That woman calls you ‘Savior of the State.’

There are a few more incidents in which 10–30 of your men die. Now you get the information that there’s going to be a huge gathering.Thousands of people are going to assemble to demand the release of two prisoners of your state. You put a curfew at 8:00 PM, the night before that. Still, people arrive in thousands. Older men, young men, women, and children. Everyone’s there.

You decide to teach them a lesson. You take your army to the gathering and start firing at the people for 10 minutes. Some die from the bullets, some die from the stampede. Nearly 300 people out of thousands are dead and about a thousand injured.

Now here’s the question:
Do you think the army used the excessive force? Or Do you think the people had it coming for them and by not obeying the orders, they were responsible for their actions?

If your answer is the latter — Well done, you have justified the ‘Jallianwala Bagh Massacre’. The incidents mentioned above were a prelude to the massacre. The woman in the story was Marcella Sherwood. And the incidents have been taken from the Wikipedia page which has fairly good citations if you want to check.

I hope your views, intentionally or unintentionally, do not end up supporting a Jallianwala Bagh like scenario.

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