Eram is a place of sacrifice located at Basudevpur block of Bhadrak district of Odisha. A sleepy hamlet in Odisha which became a silent witness to a massacre of unimaginable proportions. It is referred to be uncannily similar to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre- but, there is a very distinct difference than the Jallianwala Bagh incident - here in Eram the police contingency who open fired mercilessly & cold-bloodedly at the villagers who had gathered peacefully & non-violently (as popularised nation-wide by Mahatma Gandhi), was headed & executed by an Odia Police officer of the DSP rank & not a foreigner ‘merciless’ Englishman like General Dwyer. On 28th September 1942, hundreds of villagers had gathered in this field which was closed on three sides and had only one entrance. The Policemen fired continuously at the crowd, and within a matter of few minutes more than 300 shots were fired at the innocent villagers who had no way to escape that area as the field was bounded by three sides with only one entrance point in its north east direction, that was already blocked by the police!!!
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| Eram |
This is the Rakta Teertha or the Pilgrim of Blood where many innocents lost their lives on the hands of fellow Odias who were -as critics would say- ‘just following orders’!! . 28 persons died on the spot and around 56 got injured.Another person among the injured died later. Among the martyrs there was only one woman named Pari Bewa.
So, there are both sides of ‘explanations’ - one in favour of the order-following-dutiful-employees who did what they had to do, and then there is another one in favor of the simple unarmed villagers whose purpose was to free the country from oppressive foreign rule and doing this peacefully / non-violently.
Time and future generations will be the eternal judge of all the facets & degrees of apathy that humans inflict on their fellow countrymen & humans ! In one of the articles related to Eram it is mentioned- “Eram was perhaps the least expected of places to earn the credit of witnessing the largest killing in a single police action in the entire stage of Quit-India Revolution. And except for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, there was no other incident in the era of freedom struggle to show so many victims at one place in one operation.”
Eram is around 70 KM away from Bhadrak Town,and around 200 KM way from Bhubaneswar.
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