HVK Archives: Age of apology - Good politics & bad memories
Age of apology - Good politics & bad memories - The Times of India
Rashmee Z Ahmed
()
21 August 1997
Title: Age of apology - Good politics & bad memories
Author: Rashmee Z Ahmed
Publication: The Times of India
Date: August 21, 1997
With the Hong Kong handback over and the 50th anniversary of Indian
Independence coming soon after, Britain is allowing itself the luxury of a
season of imperial reminiscence. The airwaves, newspapers and magazines
have wall-to-wall coverage of post-Raj India. There are Nehru
hagiographies, Jinnah biographies, migrants revisiting former homes in
Lahore or wherever and old koi hais recalling the time when Johnny 'Mirchi'
took the King's shilling in India and went on to an honourable mention and
weepy plaudits from the Sikh soldiers he commanded. Britain is, of course,
rather good at this sort of thing, being an avowedly anniversary culture,
but what it will simply not do is to say sorry for the whole imperial
experiment. Arguably, that is the one thing that would positively enthuse
the post-colonials in India and Pakistan and kindle genuine enthusiasm for
a golden jubilee that Britain seems to be celebrating with more gusto than
those who actually broke free.
There have already been demands that the Queen apologise when she visits
India in October, if not for the whole sorry period, then at least for the
Jallianwala Bagh massacre and insouciant British cruelty to the unarmed
Indians peacefully gathered there. The British press is full of comment,
but no one remotely connected with the Establishment has said that the
Queen should indeed apologise. The only one to break the mould somewhat is
Labour MP Keith Vaz, but he too, seems to accept the futility of hoping for
this. Perhaps it would be nice if the Queen did throw in a few words of
genuine regret at the horror and bloodshed brought on by General Dyer's
inflamed sense of duty. But would she honestly be able to?
No Parallel
In the 50th-anniversary year of the Hiroshima bombing, American president
Bill Clinton bluntly owned to feeling "profound sorrow" that one-and-a-half
million people had lost their lives. He said he wished "none of it had
happened', but remained categorical that President Truman made the right
decision at the time. There is no parallel between Hiroshima and
Jallianwala Bagh, but it is a moot point if the Queen would argue with at
least some of what impelled General Dyer to open canon fire on the hapless
thousands gathered at Jallianwala Bagh on Baisakhi day in 1919.
Nevertheless, at a time when the British empire has shrunk to just 13 tiny
dependent territories dotted around the globe, it would be a gracious and
cost-effective exercise if the British monarch looked at the very
enterprise of empire itself in the context of this more egalitarian age and
carefully picked her way through a few well-chosen, politically correct
platitudes. And pigs could fly.
Having said that, this would not be the first such provocation for
contemporary governments to apologise for the sins of history. Nearly ten
years age, the US Congress expressed regret to the Japanese-Americans
interned during World War II in so-called 're-location centres' on the
orders of the then president, Franklin Roosevelt.
More recently, British prime minister Tony Blair sent a cautiously-worded
note of regret to the people of Ireland for the sheer incompetence of the
British government during the Irish Potato Famine 150 years ago. He didn't,
strictly speaking, apologise, but he did trash British governments of the
19th century for doing an inefficient job and standing by while a million
people starved and a million more were forced to emigrate to Britain,
America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In the process Mr Blair hoped
to soothe Irish sentiments and create a more harmonious atmosphere for the
peace process to flourish.
Cynical Gesture
There have been other instances as well, in other parts of the world, of
public self-flagellation on the part of governments, but these two examples
are fairly illustrative. They say a good deal about the late twentieth
century's growing penchant for publicising collective guilt and a bad
conscience. We live in the age of the instant apology, complete with press
releases timed for the early editions of newspapers and prime- time
television news. If anything, Mr Blair demonstrated that some apologies
work to a calculation that bad history can, on occasion, be good politics
and even better diplomacy. So might have Mr Clinton when he considered, in
June, an official apology for slavery "in the right circumstances". Closer
home, so too might the Congress party, had it gone through with a full-
throated apology for "abdicating responsibility" at the time the Babri
Masjid was demolished. But such cynical political gestures may do little
to draw a line under the past and go forward in greater amity.
Of course, not all societies handle bad memories in the same way. The
Americans have become fairly adept at the art of public breast-beating
about what went before. In 1990, the US Congress apologised to uranium
miners and those contaminated by nuclear tests in Nevada. Three years
later, it was the turn of native Hawaiians, for the American government's
role in overthrowing the Hawaiian government a century ago. Earlier this
year, Mr Clinton did his bit by saying sorry to the victims of Cold War
radiation treatment. But barring slavery, the American pattern is radically
different from that of other countries. Faced with the difficult question -
is it best to remember or to forget - Spain after Franco did both and it
worked well. Germany after communism did neither, there was no amnesty and
no amnesia, perhaps in a reaction to the aftermath of Nazism and the
Holocaust denial.
The problem with empire - and perhaps to some extent, slavery in America -
is that there is no whole truth. America, for instance, remains deeply
divided on the notion of forgiveness for slavery. Some white Americans say
it is they who deserve apology for the slaves that were taken arbitrarily
away from their great grandfathers; others say that there need be no
apology to African-Americans as slave traders actually "rescued" their
ancestors from Africa. Empire too has provoked much the same argument, as
the .'civilising" influence, which brought the railways to India, though
for all the wrong reasons; bequeathed English as the lingua franca, even
though basically to create Lord Macaulay's easily-governable babus, English
in thought and impulse and Indian by race, and because it eventually handed
down a system of democratic government. This may be of a piece with the
grosser forms of political denial and myth-making, but it merely points up
an important aspect of the issue.
Cut-off Point
Empire - and American slavery - has meant intertwined destined lives so
deeply joined it is difficult to separate the context from action and
reaction. More important, there has to be a cut-off point for the process
of public truth-seeking and truth-telling. It is undeniable that the
British seem to have got away with a great deal less national
self-examination than other countries with difficult pasts. Perhaps, Mr
Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong made a long-overdue
attempt at redressing the larger oversight when he said in his farewell to
the last British colony, "We should remember the past better to forget it".
Oxymoronic though it may be, the sentiment may go some way towards
explaining the overflow of powerful emotion for India and Pakistan at the
Independence golden jubilee.
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