Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"40-year-old General Reginald Dyer believed that authority had to be reimposed in India in general, where nationalism was growing, and in Amritsar in particular, where five Englishman had recently been killed and an English missionary, Miss Sherwood, had been molested. . . . In India, news of the massacre killed British efforts at constitutional reform and made many moderate, collaborationist, middle-class Indians into committed nationalists. The moral basis of British rule had been destroyed--it was now, and Gandhi's words, 'a satanic regime.' The days of the Raj were numbered." [Furtado: 1001 Days]