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Go beyond deep regret

Deep regret — these are the carefully chosen words the British royalty and political leadership have been using for the past two decades with regard to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

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Deep regret — these are the carefully chosen words the British royalty and political leadership have been using for the past two decades with regard to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Surely, an outrage as monumental as this one deserves much more than a mere acknowledgement — an apology, to be precise. At a Baisakhi reception in London on Wednesday, PM Theresa May repeated words from her House of Commons statement last month while referring to the ‘shameful scar’ on British-Indian history. Queen Elizabeth, who had visited the memorial in Amritsar in 1997, had called the incident a distressing example of ‘our past history with India’. During his visit in 2013, the then PM David Cameron had described the carnage as a ‘deeply shameful act’.

These statements conveniently skipped any specific mention of the hundreds of unarmed men, women and children who were gunned down by General Reginald Dyer’s troops on Baisakhi day in 1919. Amid the platitudes, there has been no attempt to pinpoint who was/were responsible for the bloodbath — Dyer, Punjab Lieutenant Governor Michael O’Dwyer, the colonial government or the Empire as a whole. Britain doesn’t have to go too far back in time to look for a precedent. In 1997, then PM Tony Blair had apologised for the death of over one million people in Ireland’s great potato famine in the 1840s. During Cameron’s tenure, Britain had said sorry for the bloody suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s and agreed to pay compensation to over 5,000 victims.

Britain can even take a cue from one of its former colonies. In 2016, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau had tendered a formal apology in his country’s House of Commons, 102 years after the Komagata Maru incident in which the then government had turned away 376 Indians who wished to settle in the Maple Country. A British apology will never happen as long as there is no political and monarchical will to own up to the century-old massacre. And there can be no possibility of forgiveness if there is no apology.

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