The days of the British Raj were numbered, as the Germans demanded its possession. In response to widespread unrest, British Army units were deployed to quell any riots within India's major cities. Many Indian intellectuals, including the eminent Mahatma Gandhi, favoured independence rather than a transfer of sovereignty from London to Berlin, stirring even more the pot. Perhaps no fire was as hot as the one that burned in the city of Armritsar, now under martial law by Colonel Reginald E.H. Dyer, who enacted ever stricter measures against locals.
On the 13th of April, Colonel Dyer ordered a ban on all meetings convinced that an insurrection was imminent. This coincided with an important Hindu-Sikh festival, taking place at the local Jallianwala Bagh, a large garden around the Sikh Golden Temple. Around 18:00, British troops began to fire into the crowd indiscriminately, killing from 400 to 1000 Indian citizens. News of this massacre did not shock Britain's residents, who were facing total collapse of the Empire, but they did enrage the Raj's peoples. No one as much as Mahatma Gandhi, who upon learning of the incident went into a nervous breakdown.
Two days after the event, Gandhi delivered a speech for the Indian National Congress titled "Kill and Burn the British Empire". In the ensuing riots and pogroms over 4,000 British servicemen and citizens were killed, lasting a whole week until the first German authorities began to arrive, successfully negotiating an end to violence and signalling the beginning of German Rule over India.