Cameron Apology: Next time maybe something more unequivocal

There is hardly a house in old Amritsar without a connection with that day in Britain’s infamy and for them David Cameron’s equivocity over a true ‘sorry’ was something of a mixed message — chalega, but definitely not the real thing

Amitabh Shukla

British Prime Minister David Cameron was not fulfilling a diplomatic role as Prime Minister of Britain at the Jallianwala Bagh Memorial this week. He was just upholding a tradition of wooing the ethnic vote back home by making solemn declarations of correcting the wrongs of history. Last November, Cameron’s Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, visited Takht Keshgarh Sahib and then had dinner at a Punjabi dhaba in Chandigarh in November. The message conveyed by both the Prime Ministers to their expatriate Punjabi voters was simple — “We care for your feelings, so please…your vote.”

Cameron’s message to the half-a-million-strong Punjabi community back home would not be lost when he seeks re-election in May 2015. He did all it required to win their support two years before the polls to the House of Commons — he sported a blue scarf to cover his head; visited the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple); went to the community kitchen (langar) to see food being prepared where he tried his hand at making a roti; took blessings at the sanctum sanctorum by standing for a while at the Akal Takht and finally took a parikarma (round) of the marbled perimeter of the temple like any other devout.

But people of the city, almost everyone who remembers the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy through tales of their grandparents and elders, folklore and history, wanted more than what he wrote in the Visitor’s Book at the memorial which witnessed the greatest tragedy during the freedom struggle of the country. “Britain apologizes” — this is what the people wanted written there for perpetuity. They nearly got it but not exactly. “This was a deeply shameful event in British history,” Cameron wrote, adding, “One that Winston Churchill rightly described at that time as monstrous. We must never forget what happened here and we must ensure that the UK stands up for the right of peaceful protests around the world”.

“We have waited for an apology for the last 94 years,” said Bhushan Behl, grandson of Lala Hari Ram Behl, a martyr of that infamous act on the day of Baishakhi in 1919 in the holy city. Behl heads an organisation called the Jallianwala Bagh Shahid Parivar Samiti to keep the memory of the martyrs alive and bring together the descendants of the martyrs.

As the tragedy is etched in the collective memory of the people, the organisation still remains relevant in the city. The members of the organisation had sought a meeting with the visiting British PM, but they were simply not allowed free movement for an hour when Cameron was in the walled city.

But the voice of Behl and many others, who wanted an outright apology without mixing the words in diplomatic nuance, was drowned because of the gesture of Cameron in visiting the holiest Sikh shrine. Even the Sikh hardliners and the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee did not demand an outright apology.

“After Winston Churchill in 1920, this is for the first time that a high ranking elected leader of Britain has used words like shameful and monstrous. We are satisfied,” an Akali leader said, adding, “this would help heal the collective psyche of the Amritsar residents”.

Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, who received Cameron at the Golden Temple, was satisfied with the visit and the homage paid to the martyrs. He considered it as a ‘sort of an apology’ for which the people of the country, especially Punjab had been waiting for long.

The caretaker of the Jallianwala Bagh memorial, Sukumar Mukherjee, whose grandfather SC Mukherjee shifted to Amritsar in 1910 and took up the cause of the memorial soon after the tragedy in 1920 with national leaders, was satisfied too. “The British PM was apologetic. A word here or there does not matter, the intent does. Homage has been paid to the martyrs,” Mukherjee said, whose family has not left the city ever since they became the caretakers of the memorial in the early 1920s.

Though the demographic profile of Amritsar has changed like any other city over the past hundred years, what stands out here is the fact that in the walled city almost every family either lost an ancestor or has information of somebody with a forebear killed on the orders of General Reginald Dyer. So the pain associated with the Jallianwala Bagh lingers, even though the mayhem of that afternoon 94 years ago was subsequently overtaken by one of the greatest man-made tragedies in world history — the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 — where the volume of Punjab’s pain was tremendously profound and still overwhelms the national policy on a variety of issues.

Cameron, despite his vote-bank oriented intentions, ended up making a beginning of recognising a historical tragedy during colonial rule and perhaps this was the right way to move forward. Residents believe that the near future could see another Prime Minister, King or Queen of Britain who would not only bow his head before the martyrs’ column, but express something more unequivocal than “regret” so that Britain’s bad name is cleansed. (February 23, 2013) 

http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/item/53476-next-time-maybe-something-more-unequivocal.html