Hans Raj

Hans Raj (born 1896) was a young Indian from Amritsar, British India. In June 1919, he became an approver for the British government during the Amritsar Conspiracy Case Trial. In exchange for his own freedom, he testified for the Crown and identified fellow Indian revolutionaries.

In early 1919, Hans Raj became active in the non-violent disobedience or Satyagraha movement and began to participate in protests against British rule in India. He was appointed the joint secretary of the Satyagraha organisation in Amritsar and worked to help local Indian leaders Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal, whose arrests and deportation on 10 April 1919 triggered riots. He subsequently arranged a meeting at Jallianwalla Bagh on 13 April 1919, and was present during the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre. Having survived that day, he was soon arrested but became an approver for the British, providing evidence which led to the sentencing of Kitchlew and Satyapal to two years imprisonment.

Shortly after the trial, he was transferred by the British to Mesopotamia, Iraq. Historians have debated whether he was an agent for the police all along or simply took the opportunity to save his own skin by testifying for the British.

Early life Hans Raj was from the Katra Bagh Singh area of Amritsar. In 1911, he passed the university entrance exam. His first job was with the North Western State Railway as a ticket inspector, after which he unsuccessfully tried to join the police force and the Indian Defence Force. He subsequently took a job as a correspondence clerk for a Municipal Commissioner at Amritsar, became a banker and then a medical and stationary agent, but was frequently found to be unable to hold down employment due to his dishonesty.

Both his mother and his wife were rumoured to be prostitutes, and were said to provide for him. It was also rumoured that he had close associations with the police. He became the joint secretary of the non-violent disobedience or Satygraha organisation, frequently attended their events and was aware of who had signed its pledge.

On 10 April 1919, the Indian political leaders Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal were summoned to deputy commissioner Miles Irving's home on the orders of Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab. They were accompanied by Hans Raj, who waited outside with his colleague Jai Ram Singh. Satypal and Kitchlew were secretly arrested under the Defence of India Act 1915 and deported to Dharamasala, at the foot of the Himalayas, where they were kept under house arrest. The incident triggered a petition for their release and subsequent local riots, where a number of both Europeans, including the school teacher Marcella Sherwood, and Indians were injured and killed, and official buildings defaced.

Jallianwala Bagh

On the evening of 12 April 1919, as a result of the deportations of Kitchlew and Satypal, in addition to the protests over the Rowlatt Acts and the exclusion of Mahatma Gandhi from entering Punjab, Hans Raj arranged a meeting to be held the next day on 13 April at Jallianwala Bagh grounds. Seth Gul Mohammed, the son of a glassware merchant, helped Hans Raj organise the meeting. and historian V. N. Datta who wrote that Hans Raj assisted General Dyer in planning the massacre and expected the shootings on 13 April, going as far as to build a wooden platform designed to provide himself with a hiding place during the shooting.

However, Anita Anand's research, published in 2019, found no evidence that Hans Raj had any prior connections with the police. Being in the crowd on 13 April and going into hiding afterwards, according to Kim A. Wagner, suggests that there was no conspiracy and that Hans Raj was not an "agent provocateur" as some have concluded. Wagner states that Raj may not have testified for the British voluntarily. Edmund Candler described Hans Raj as a "pariah of fortune". The secretary of the local Congress Committee described him as "a man of no character". Pearay called him a "rudderless youth of an extremely dubious character".