BRITISH Prime Minister Theresa May recently expressed her “deep regret” for the Jallianwala Bagh carnage whose centenary India, Pakistan and Bangladesh sombrely observe today. As the Indian media has pointed out, in a press conference in Brussels the next day, Ms May “sincerely regretted” not delivering Brexit on time. The inability to cleanly apologise for the brutality and callousness that marked British rule reveals, unsurprisingly, that lessons from history are not always easy to learn. The old apathy laced with bouts of cruelty towards the ‘natives’ seems to have never left South Asia though the British went home more than 70 years ago. From Srinagar to Trivandrum, from Quetta to Dhaka, the promise of real freedom has eluded the quest for democracy in the successor countries, while many of the trappings of colonial high-handedness were quickly adopted as the norm on the mottled dawn of Independence by the new rulers. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place in Amritsar on April 13, 1919, when British troops mowed down a peaceful congregation of mostly Sikh men and women. Over 15,000 people had gathered on Baisakhi day in the public park that had a single narrow opening. They were assembled to protest the abusive Rowlatt Act, and Gen Reginald Dyer set out to silence them. Promptly, and with no warning, 1,650 rounds were fired with powerful rifles. Between 500 and 600 people died — according to some estimates, the figure was much higher at 1,000 — with three times that number wounded.

The bloodletting was seen as a reaction to the rare camaraderie that Hindus and Muslims had achieved in recent years. Guided by Mr Jinnah and Mr Gandhi since the Lucknow Pact in 1916, the unity posed an existential challenge to British rule. Some scholars have averred that the history of un-partitioned India would have been truly rewarding had the British decided to leave in 1919 — as a reward, if for no other reason, for the sacrifices that Indians of different religious hues had made for the war effort. Instead, the demeaning law was inflicted, requiring Indians not to hold meetings and to crawl in a street of Amritsar where a female Christian missionary was injured during protests against the banishment of Hindu and Muslim leaders from the Punjab. The colonial era may have ended but laws from that period still dog India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, sometimes enforced by the military, occasionally by civilian rulers, and increasingly so by state-backed mobs, which is an innovation on how the British crushed the quest for truer freedoms.

Published in Dawn, April 13th, 2019