‘I have not said a word about the events in the Punjab, not because I have up to now not thought or felt over them, but because I have not known what to believe and what not to believe'
This is what the Father of the Nation shared a month after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in a letter to the Viceroy's Private Secretary. If Mahatma Gandhi fell short of words, who are we to describe what was the darkest day in the history of the country.
Baisakhi, Punjab's festival of harvest, was never the same after April 13, 1919, when the Butcher of Amritsar, Colonel, Reginald Edward Harry Dyer, open fired during a peaceful protest held against the Rowlatt Act at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. An estimated 1,650 rounds of bullets were fired for 10 to 15 minutes straight. The absolute carnage that resulted killed many, the number depends on the source you are looking at though. As per the British government, 379 people died. Others say a lot more.
Control your mind
Mind control might sound like a recent scare but it dates back many years. About 69 years, to be exact.
It was on April 13, 1953 that Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Allen Dulles ordered the agency to develop mind-controlling drugs to be deployed against the members of the Soviet bloc. The name of the programme? MK Ultra
MK Ultra was the code name of an illegal human experimentation programme. It was run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Stephen Kinzer, who was a journalist and spent several years investigating the programme, called it “the most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control”.
The programme involved more than 150 humans who were experimented upon and as a result, were engaged with psychedelic drugs, paralytics and electroshock therapy. Many of the tests were conducted at prisons, universities and hospitals in the United States and Canada. The programme was officially halted in 1973.
