After other
Khudai Khidmatgar leaders were arrested, a large crowd of the group gathered at the Qissa Khwani bazaar. As troops of the British Indian Army (BIA) moved into the bazaar, the crowd was loud and stones were thrown. A BIA dispatch rider was killed and his body burned. Two BIA armored cars drove into the square at high speed, killing several people. It is claimed that the crowd continued their commitment to non-violence, offering to disperse if they could gather their dead and injured, and if the British Indian Army left the square. The BIA refused to leave, so the protesters remained with the dead and injured. The Khudai Khidmatgar members willingly faced bullets, responding without violence. Instead, many members repeated "God is great"(اللہُ اکبر) and clutched the
Qur'an as they were shot. while nationalist sources claimed several hundred were killed, with many more wounded. Two platoons of a respected British Indian Army regiment, the
Royal Garhwal Rifles, refused to board buses that were to take them into Peshawar for anti-riot duty. A British civil servant wrote later that "hardly any regiment of the Indian Army won greater glory in the Great War (World War I) than the Garhwal Rifles, and the defection of part of the regiment sent shock waves through India, of apprehension to some, of exultation to others." The NCOs of the two platoons, including one led by Hawaldar Major Chandra Singh Garhwali, involved were sentenced to terms of up to eight years imprisonment. The violence continued for six hours.
Gene Sharp, who has written a study of
nonviolent resistance, describes the scene on that day: When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, those behind came forward with their chests bared and exposed themselves to the fire, so much so that some people got as many as twenty-one bullet wounds in their bodies, and all the people stood their ground without getting into a panic. . . . The
Anglo-Indian paper of
Lahore, which represents the official view, itself wrote to the effect that the people came forward one after another to face the firing and when they fell wounded they were dragged back and others came forward to be shot at. This state of things continued from 11 till 5 o'clock in the evening. When the number of corpses became too many, the ambulance cars of the government took them away. ==Aftermath==