If we are to talk about apologies with any degree of honesty, then there’s plenty to be remorseful about in post Independent India. It’s not a foreign colonial power, but our own governments that also owe us a range of apologies. Nobody is owed an apology more than the Dalits and the women of this country. But who would issue this apology, when all of society has colluded — and still does — in their systemic deprivation?
Shashi Tharoor would like the British to apologise for 200 years of colonial rule. He believes that British Prime Minister Theresa May must visit Jallianwala Bagh and go down on her knees and express remorse for the colonial exploitation of India.
Tharoor’s demand for an apology and reparations, first made in the course of an Oxford Union debate a year ago, won him thunderous applause. A YouTube video went viral and even Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the Congress MP on his return home.
Nobody disagrees with Tharoor, the British have much to be sorry for — from the economic ruin of indigenous weavers to the death of four million people in the Bengal famine. But, if we are to talk about apologies with any degree of honesty, then there’s plenty to be remorseful about in post-Independent India. It’s not a foreign colonial power, but our own governments that also owe us a range of apologies.
Nobody is owed an apology more than the Dalits and the women of this country. But who would issue this apology, when all of society has colluded — and still does — in their systemic deprivation?
So, leaving that #1 apology aside, what do our own governments have to be sorry about?
The first is every communal riot from Nellie to Mumbai and Gujarat to Delhi. It doesn’t matter which government was in power where the riot occurred. If there was a breach in law and order, then it is incumbent upon the government in charge to beg for forgiveness from not only every family that lost a loved one, but every citizen who lived through it.
The second would be the Emergency. Has the Congress ever apologized? To my mind, the suspension of democracy, along with such human rights violations as forcible sterilizations, deserves a public mea culpa.
Every state government that mutely witnesses farmer suicide caused by agrarian distress needs to apologize for a failure of policy and vision that has allowed this tragedy to continue year after year.
Add to this list, fake encounters and “disappearances” that strike against democracy and the idea of the civilized world, “innocent till proven guilty”. It doesn’t matter if these encounters by and large are bolstered by public support, any government that believes in rule of law must act against them.
Governments are appointed by us and are, as a consequence, accountable to us. The term public servant has gone out of vogue but it’s always useful to remember that the people elected by us are answerable to us; they are not the “ruling class”. If our governments should fail either through policy or through action then we as the citizens who put them in charge, are owed an apology.
An apology is also the crucial first step towards healing and reconciliation. You cannot move forward unless there is an expression of regret. In South Africa, FW de Klerk apologised for apartheid. Successive German heads of state have expressed remorse for the Holocaust. Perhaps the most moving was the sight of the then chancellor Willy Brandt falling, wordlessly, to his knees on a state visit to Poland in 1970.
In India, part of the problem with any discussion on communal riots is the inevitable follow up question: “But what about”. Whether it is Narendra Modi under whose watch the 2002 riots took place in Gujarat or the Gandhi-led Congress for the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, there has never been a heart-felt expression of regret.
An apology for a wrong committed is simply the right thing to do. When Justin Trudeau apologized before his Parliament for the Komagatu Maru incident of 1914 when a ship carrying mostly Sikh passengers was denied entry into Canada and forced to return to British India where many met with a violent end, we in India applauded the gesture.
“People who are not responsible today for the wrongs done by their for-bearers in the past era apologize nonetheless to people who are not the ones to whom wrong was done,” Tharoor told the PTI. A good place to start would be at home.