Two tricolours, one dream

In their fight for independence, India and Ireland found common ground in the Dagshai hills

- \PRATUL SHARMA

The hills around Dagshai were far barer a century ago than they are today.

It would see pine come up later, seeded and nurtured by units of Scottish regiments who served in the region under the British. In 1920, the slopes were still sparse, the cantonment stark against the ridge above the old Hindustan-Tibet road. Sparse they might have been, but the hills knew how to hold their silence. On the morning of November 2, 1920, they stood still as it rained bullets near the walls of the military jail.

A few minutes earlier, a young Irish private, James Joseph Daly, had walked into the yard with a green silk handkerchief around his neck. A doctor had asked whether he wanted morphine. Daly had refused. Moments later, the Royal Fusiliers—infantry regiment of the British Army— had opened fire. As his body fell, the priest stepped forward to administer the last sacrament and nearly took a stray bullet. Daly’s comrades gathered his remains and handed them over for burial in the Catholic cemetery—grave number 340.

Daly was 52 days short of his 21st birthday. His death made him the last soldier to be executed by the British Army for a military offence. He and other Irish soldiers—many of them world war veterans—had mutinied in protest against the violence in Ireland by the English. It mattered little that they were 7,000km from home, stationed with the Con-naught Rangers regiment at Solan in Himachal Pradesh. It was not the first time soldiers in India had turned against their British commanders; Indian sepoys had done so in 1857.

In a letter to his mother written days earlier, Daly explained himself plainly: “What harm it is all for Ireland! I am not afraid to die, but it is thinking of you I am.” His mother was informed of his execution through a telegram on December 31.