The Khalsa Advocate , an English weekly of the Sikhs issued from Amritsar, published blood-curdling accounts of the Nankana massacre. “We cannot help saying,” comments our contemporary on the incident, “that the whole affair seems to have been premeditated, fully matured and cut and dried. Deliberate and calculated arrangements for giving such a horrid attack to the Sikhs cannot be the development of one single day or merely spurred by the moment. Nor can this development be the brainwork of one single man. An organised and deliberate conspiracy seems to have been at work not for weeks but for months together.” The Mahant, it would appear, had not disguised part at least of his atrocious intentions. “The strangest and the most distressing part of the whole thing which pinches and galls us the most,” says the Sikh paper, “Is the studied indifference (or shall we say wanton) of the ubiquitous C.I.D. Ever since the Nankana Sahib fair in November last, even before it, the Sikh Press had been constantly rending the skies with the cries that Mahant Narain Das had been manufacturing a large number of Chhavis and Gundassas with a view to arming his accomplices with these sinews of war to give a formidable attack to the Panth who was determined to effect the reform of their historic Gurudwara at Nankana Sahib by pronouncedly non-violent methods.
