Apologies for the Past

When David Cameron apologized for Jallianwala Bagh almost a century after the event, it hardly created a ripple. About the only thing it did was to make people realize the Brit PM was in town!

So I found this Guardian article on the apology interesting: it said such a late apology hardly helps anyone. In fact, the article said, the timing of the apology seems suspect given that Cameron came as part of a trade delegation to one of the fastest growing economies of the world. Instead, if Britain was truly apologetic, the article recommended making the teaching of both the good (Indian civil services, educational reforms, the railways) and the bad of British colonialism (other massacres, the looting etc and not just in India) a part of the British education system. Because:

“For we must never forget that whatever its achievements, the British empire, like every empire before or since, was both gained and maintained by military might, and built over a mountain of skulls of those it conquered and defeated.”

A few years back, I’d have agreed with this article. But I guess I am older (and wiser?) now. Are apologies, even long delayed, really meaningless? Don’t some countries still demand apologies for decades old crimes? Like the Chinese from the Japanese for World War II?

More importantly, if Britain did make its own war and colonial crimes a part of its education system, what would be the consequence? Sure, the next generation Brits would strut less with their morally superior attitude. They would know that most victors only differ in degrees, not kind.

But also, and this is the reason I don’t believe the Brits should change their education system: what do you think Muslims would take away from this? See, they would say, even the Brits admit their carnages and war crimes against Islam. We ourselves are pure as snow, the innocent victims. So if the Brits do change their education system, they should also teach crimes by the others: the burning of the library of Alexandria, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and the London train bombings and the perpetrators of the same. Let’s say they taught all that at school: now isn’t there a risk that the next generation Brits would also grow up thinking certain groups are barbaric through the ages, that they don’t become truly Brit and continue to hold onto loyalties to countries that they never even visited?

So while well intended, I hope the Brits don’t go through with the proposals of the Guardian.