The Amritsar massacre in 1919 was "a deeply shameful event in British history" said our Prime Minister yesterday.
The events of that day were described in 1920 by Winston Churchill as "monstrous", and in political realities Churchill was not averse to the brutal use of force.
In 1997 the Queen described the event as a "distressing" example of the "moments of sadness" in the history between Britain and India.
In 1982 Ben Kingsley played the role of Ghandi in a film which I think is still the high point in his career. In that film, directed by Sir Richard Attenborough, the Armitsar massacre was portrayed as the logistical and inevitable consequence of blind loyalty to Empire, equipped by military capability and fuelled by racist brutality and unexamined claims of moral right founded on power and might.
I still remember the sickening dread of those scenes as the British Army moved into position, blocked exits, and opened fire. I was sure this was an outrageous distortion of history, a Hollywoodisation which falsified truth and exaggerated fact as a technique of audience control, a deliberate black contrast to the saintly non-violent Ghandi.
But we know it was nothing of the kind. The argument about whether the casualties reached 379 or 1,000 is obscenely irrelevant. Amritsar remains a crime against humanity on any arithmetic. And if soldiers fired until they ran out of ammunition, and the crowd were trapped in a square, assuming professional competence even skill in the soldiers ( and perhaps for some, such revolt at the murderous order that they aimed high or wide), the numbers can at least remain contested with the likeliehood of revision upwards.
I mention all this during Lent. A season of creative self-criticism, a time to examine our story and our history and ask life-encouraging questions about what is good and to be striven for, and what is wrong and to be renounced. That Britain through its Parliament, Prime Ministers, and Monarchs including Queen Elizabeth II, has never named its shame, has never apologised to the Indian people for that particular event.
The opportunity to do so seems once again to have gone. Ironically the British Prime Minister is now visiting an independent India seeking to build trade relations with a country that was once an Imperial subject, its goods plundered by bthe occupying power. And its people at times brutally suppressed for daring to wish their freedom.
I accept that what I've written is one viewpoint. That values have changed, and I can be accused of moral anachronism by overlooking the realities of Imperial history, and not mentioning the enormous economic and geo-political benefits from which Britain still benefits. It was still a crime against humanity. It remains one for which we have not formally and genuinely accepted responsibility, apologised and sought reconciliation. That saddens me, and shames me. The nemesis of such violence was a small man spinning cotton by hand, and winning the heart of a people. The acknowledging such violence as an atrocity for which we apologis, would require an equally humane human being.
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