Congress MP and author Shashi Tharoor today said the Jalianwala Bagh centenary in 2019 will be a “good time” for the British to apologise to Indians for wrongs committed during their rule.
The former diplomat, who was speaking on his book An Era of Darkness: The British Empire In India before inaugurating the Kolkata Literary Festival-2017, said, “Either the British Prime Minister or a member of the royal family can come and convey their own profound apologies to the people of India, not just for that atrocity (Jallianwala Bagh massacre) but for all wrongs done during the empire.”
“Why not use that opportunity ? ...that would be a very fine gesture because after all the wrongs were done in the name of the Crown,” he said. According to him it’s never too late to admit. “But the fact is that what the British have done is opposite.”
“They (British) have brushed it under the carpet. There is a certain historical amnesia. You find it in the way the British relate to their own colonial past. There is a lot of romanticising of the empire, he said, adding that a lot of self justification was taking place amongst British historians today, who praise the empire as a good thing.
“I am concerned. What is to my mind the best thing to do, is to seek a certain atonement, which in the case of the British, has never happened. They have never apologised to the people of India for what was done here for 200 years. There are a couple of examples I have mentioned in the preface of the book,” he said.
He gave Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s example, who apologised for the 1914 Komagata Maru incident where hundreds of Hindu, Sikh and Mulsim immigrants were denied entry into Canada and turned away from the port of Vancouver to return to an uncertain and ultimately violent fate in India.