Jallianwala: No apology yet

One hundred years since the Jallianwala Bagh massacre on that Vaisakhi Day, Britain has sometimes shown some remorse but never an apology has been tendered.

From Winston Churchill, when he was Secretary of State for War, to Stanley Baldwin, who was soon to become Prime Minister, there were frowns on the excessive use of force and over unBritish handling of an explosive law and order situation. But there never was an outright admission of moral lapses. (Nobel poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling, a cousin of Baldwin, maintained a discreet silence on the issue for a long time.)

Even in more recent times British monarch Queen Elizabeth II during her 1997 visit to India to celebrate the 50th year of the country’s independence skirted the issue by simply laying the wreath, bowing at the massacre memorial and describing the event as a tragic episode.

David Cameron during his visit as Prime Minister in 2013 expressed his profound regret at the 1919 event and wrote: “This was a deeply shameful event in British history, one that Winston Churchill rightly described at the time as ‘monstrous’. We must never forget what happened here.” But he also stopped short of offering an apology.

Sunil Kapoor, whose great-grandfather was killed in the massacre says, “I am not satisfied because he (Cameron) did not meet the descendants. If you feel shameful, why not make an apology? “For 94 years we are waiting for justice.”

Earlier this year also the issue was raised by Indian community leaders in the UK but the issue remains unresolved as the nation at large is fully immersed in grappling with the Brexit crisis.

An apology may appear unpalatable to some but the idea is not so fanciful. Willy Brandt as Chancellor of (West) Germany apologised to Israel over the Nazi Holocaust. The Vatican too apologised to the Jews in 1998 and repented for the Roman Catholic Church’s silence during the Holocaust years. Almost in a similar vein, President Bill Clinton apologised to Africa for historic wrongs such as slavery.

Back in 1919 the imposition of Martial Law in Punjab in the immediate aftermath of Jallianwala massacre was accompanied by a gag on the Press under which publication of Tribune from Lahore was suspended and its Editor Kalinath Ray was jailed for two years. Bombay Chronicle Editor B.G. Horniman was ‘deported’ from the city while its reporter Gobardhan Das was jailed for two years.

A year later, Churchill’s response to the event was cool and considered, admitting frankly that an ‘unarmed’ crowd was fired upon killing 397 people and wounding over 1,200.

“The crowd was unarmed, except with bludgeons. It was not attacking anybody or anything. It was holding a seditious meeting. When fire had been opened upon it to disperse it, it tried to run away. Pinned up in a narrow place considerably smaller than Trafalgar Square, with hardly any exit, and packed together so that one bullet would drive through three or four bodies, the people ran madly this way and the other.”

“When the fire was directed upon the centre, they ran to the sides. The fire was then directed upon the sides. Many threw themselves down on the ground, and the fire was then directed on the ground. This continued for 8 or 10 minutes, and it stopped only when the ammunition had reached the point of exhaustion,” Churchill stated according to the British Parliament’s Hansard record.

Churchill described the ‘slaughter’ of nearly 400 persons a ‘monstrous’ event which was ‘not the British way of doing business.’ But there was no apology. During all the parliamentary debates in that turbulent era, Kipling though he was lionised by the Press and the public, maintained a curious silence on the issue, perhaps avoiding any open clash with cousin Stanley Baldwin. But in later years, Kipling made his sympathies known with tributes to General Dyer.

Kipling’s final tribute with definitive words of edification simply said: “He did his duty as he saw it.” The tribute was inscribed on the card accompanying Kipling’s wreath at the funeral service for Gen Dyer at St. Martin-in-the Fields, London.

Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer who ordered the massacre of the innocents on April 13 – though idolised by vast sections of British press and public, was retired without any promotion. Hailed as the man who “saved India” for the Crown, a large benefit fund amounting to over 26,000 Pounds Sterling was raised for the ailing veteran. But he remained officially as mere Colonel till the end of his life in 1927.

Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Lieutenant- Governor of Punjab in 1919 praised Kipling for his ‘political foresight’ and approvingly quoted him as saying, “Asia is not going to be civilised after the method of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old…She will never attend Sunday School or learn to vote, unless she uses swords for voting tickets.”

In his obituary tribute to Kipling, O’Dwyer wrote: “As might be expected from the poet of our empire he lamented the steady surrender of our position and responsibilities in India, having little faith in ‘Pagett, MP’ and still less in the capacity of the Indian intelligentsia to govern with the pen.

Clearly Kipling and O’Dwyer were on the same wavelength – and so utterly on the wrong side of ‘political foresight.‘ Neither of them could imagine India becoming the world’s largest , thriving and resilient voting democracy.

O’Dwyer was, however, shot dead in London on March 13, 1940, by Udham Singh who had taken the name of Ram Muhammad Singh Azad, symbolising the unity the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities, to avenge the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the execution of earlier martyrs Bhagat Singh and his comrades Rajguru and Sukhdev in 1932.

Uddham Singh was hanged in London’s Pentonville Prison on 31 July 1940 and was buried in prison grounds. His remains were exhumed in 1974 and repatriated to his native village Sunam in Punjab. After cremation, his ashes were scattered in the river Sutlej.