Perhaps there can never be ‘righting of
historical wrongs’.
Apologise [Verb]
1. To make excuse for or regretful acknowledgment of a
fault or offense.
2. To make a formal defense or justification in speech or
writing.
It takes great courage and conviction to even
apologise……….
India, we claim obtained its freedom
without blood-shedding, which is far from truth. We have not properly
recognized and appreciated the many lives of martyrs who selflessly died in the
cause of freedom. The Amritsar massacre is one of the worst massacres in the history of
World; people have died on battlefields but not on meeting platforms.
the massacre from the film 'Gandhi'
Jallianwala Bagh the public garden in Amritsar would ever
nurse the wounds and painful memory of those lives lost on that fateful day on
13th April 1919……… it now houses a memorial of national importance,
established in 1951 to commemorate the massacre. The brutal killings of British Raj
statistically placed by their own historians as : 379 fatalities and 1100 wounded. The true figures of fatalities may never be
known but most likely are lhigher than the official figure of 379. The
Jallianwala Bagh massacre (also known as the Amritsar
massacre), took place in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden in the northern
Indian city of Amritsar
on 13 April 1919. The shooting that took place was ordered by Brigadier-General
Reginald E.H. Dyer.
On Sunday, 13 April 1919, Dyer was convinced of a major
insurrection and thus he banned all meetings. On hearing that a meeting of
15,000 to 20,000 people including women, children and the elderly had assembled
at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer went with fifty riflemen to a raised bank and ordered
them to shoot at the crowd. Dyer continued the firing for about ten minutes,
till the ammunition supply was almost exhausted; Dyer stated that 1,650 rounds
had been fired, a number which seems to have been derived by counting empty
cartridge cases picked up by the troops. Dyer was removed from duty and forced
to retire. He became a celebrated hero in Britain among people with
connections to the British Raj.
In Tamil, we often get confused with
Dyer….. there were two of them. Michael O'Dwyer, the British
Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab who approved the
action and Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer who executed the mindless massacre.
There is news of British Prime Minister David Cameron
visiting the site of massacre and repenting for the wrong……… but his statement
stated it as a "deeply shameful event" in British history but stopped
well short of a full apology !!!!!!!!!.
In the British Media, David Cameron has defended his decision to stop
short of delivering a formal British apology for the Amritsar massacre in 1919. Guardian reports that ‘As relatives of the
victims expressed disappointment, the prime minister said it would be wrong to
"reach back into history" and apologise for the wrongs of British
colonialism.’
Cameron bowed his head at the memorial, in the Jallianwala
Bagh public gardens. In a handwritten note in the book of condolence for
victims of the massacre, Cameron quoted Winston Churchill's remarks from 1920.
He described the shootings, in his own words, as a "deeply shameful
event". "In my view," he said, "we are dealing with
something here that happened a good 40 years before I was even born, and which
Winston Churchill described as 'monstrous' at the time and the British
government rightly condemned at the time. So I don't think the right thing is
to reach back into history and to seek out things you can apologise for.
"I think the right thing is to acknowledge
what happened, to recall what happened, to show respect and understanding for
what happened. "That is why the words I used are right: to pay respect to
those who lost their lives, to remember what happened, to learn the lessons, to
reflect on the fact that those who were responsible were rightly criticised at
the time, to learn from the bad and to cherish the good."
Dear Prime Minister, our erstwhile ruler –
you are the Head of the State and it is the State owning the actions and has
nothing to do with the age…… century old rules, customs, laws and more get
interpreted by various people at various places, not necessary that any of them
were born at the time, they were made…. !!!
The relatives of the victims were naturally disappointed. The ordinary Q is "If he said it is shameful, why did he
not apologise?"
It was a daylight massacre ~ not intended to curb the political
uprising but horrific man slaughter and
yet British are reported to be kind and we claim that we got our freedom
without bloodshed. Winston Churchill who incidentally also vehemently opposed India’s independence, didn’t condemn or even
mention the huge support Dyer enjoyed among other British who thought of him as
Rudyard Kipling did as “the man who saved India.” They raised 26,000 pounds
sterling for his benefit. A women’s committee presented him a sword of honour
as the “Saviour of the Punjab.”
Brigadier-General Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab called Dyer’s use of force “justified.”
Historially, Mr Cameron is the first sitting PM
to visit the Golden Temple at Amritsar.
Mr Cameron concluded his visit to India
yesterday with a trip to the Golden
Temple, the holiest site
for Sikhs, and the Jallianwala Bagh gardens – and sure politicians would gloat
over the apology made by the British Prime Minister.
You don’t often hear expressions of contrition in politics,
but on Wednesday, quite remarkably, we
heard two such – one from a visiting Prime Minister and the other from our
home-grown Home Minister. On quite another plane, Home Minister Sushil Kumar
Shinde expressed “regret” over his remark of a month ago in which he had
claimed sensationally that the BJP and the RSS were organising camps to spawn
“Hindu terror”. In a statement issued on Wednesday, in response to the BJP’s
threat to disrupt proceedings in Parliament over his remark, Shinde said that
his comment “has been understood to mean that I was linking terrorism to a
particular religion and was accusing certain political organisations of being
involved in organising terror camps.”
‘Sorry’ is the hardest word in the English lexicon for
politicians. But they don’t control the
words nor care for them, when it comes to public speaking and denying later. Certainly
Cameron sounds a lot more diplomatic than Prince Philip who claimed that he’d
heard the death toll had been exaggerated. And he even sounds a little more
contrite than Queen Elizabeth who called it a “difficult episode” but then
briskly moved on saying “history cannot be rewritten”.
Jallianwalah Bagh is
a stark reminder of the brutal face of colonialism at its most naked. David
Cameron with his “apology” has clothed it once again with a sense of basic
British decency. Cameron has come to India
to do sell the new Britain
and its arms. History has it that on 13 March 1940, at Caxton Hall in London, Udham
Singh, a great martyr from Sunam who had witnessed the events in Amritsar and
was himself wounded, shot and killed Michael O'Dwyer, the British
Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab at the time of the massacre, who had approved
Dyer's action and was believed to be the main planner. (Dyer himself had died
in 1927.)
With regards – S. Sampathkumar
21st Feb 2013
Photos courtesy : www.dailymail.co.uk
