Just One Apology After Another

THE INDIANS DO not like us. We colonised them, looked down on them and abused many of them. At Amritsar in 1919, Brigadier Reginald Dyer, effectively ordered the execution of 379 Sikhs. An episode Churchill was to describe as monstrous, as our prime minister has pointed out on his visit to the Golden Temple.

            We were not however, the only colonial power; other powers such as France, Germany, and to a lesser extent, Belgium and Portugal also had a role to play as colonial supremacists. But of all the European colonial powers, those nations under British occupancy faired far better than did the Algerians, Vietnamese, Congolese and West Africans to mention but a few. The British were arrogant, but their leaders were not racist. They never thought of India as anything other than as a culturally advanced civilisation. Enoch Powell adored the country, and from what I have read, seemed to pine for it.

            If we were as bad as modern India sees us, then why oh why are there today over one and a half million, including  second and third generation Indians, living among us? It seems that today modern India is enjoying being our puppet master as we were once theirs. Cameron, begging bowl in hand, has delivered a Foreign Office scrutinised apology to the Indian people; this follows one for Bloody Sunday and another for the Hillsborough deaths: as well as the 1200 patients who perished at the hands at staff Staffordshire NHS.

            My immediate impression of Cameron’s visit to Amritsar, judged by the photographs and news videos I have seen, is of a man acting the role of repentant sinner (I hope it is only acting),  in order to secure business opportunities for his country. As a citizen of the UK, I found such a pitiable display of an almost a suppliant disposition awkward and discomforting; but then he opened his mouth, and the visual was supplemented by rhetoric, and I felt ashamed – for here was a statesman-beggar; a prime minister of a once great nation, being brought down: the Indians must have enjoyed it!

            Culturally speaking, the Indians are today far more snobbish than, in times past, had been the British. They find harbour in such snobbishness, for instance, against either the Afro-Caribbean or African black . In our multicultural society, for instance, the Indian is far more prejudiced against the Afro-Caribbean, in direct proportion to the way the Afro-Caribbean believe the whites are.

            India, even today, sadly shows far more prejudice among themselves than the British Empire ever expressed toward them. In the UK, historically, the class system has been the  great bugbear. But in India the caste system has been far worse. The untouchables, even to this day, are seen as nothing that should be regarded as anything less than a lower order of animal life; and they have always been treated as such historically.

            When the British first walked into India, they were given a lesson in barbarity by the Indians themselves. They were introduced to the caste system whereby the so-called untouchables were placed in servitude; a servitude comparable to black slavery in the American South. The menial and repellent tasks such as the disposal of human sewage were laid at the untouchables feet.

            Yet such slavery, even to this day, lay not at the feet of their one-time colonial masters; but at the feet of Indian culture. The caste system still to this day exists; but Cameron will remain silent about it, for the acquisition of Indian gold is his main objective.

INDIA HAS BEEN home to the most class ridden culture on this planet. I know the UK  has long been considered to have held on to this title. But we never had an untouchable class – a class like the Jews, that Nazism sought to drive to extinction. The word untouchable, describes the snobbery, not only of India’s elite but also of almost every Hindu or any of the other of the 21 regional accents.

            David Cameron should be ashamed of himself for prostrating himself before a once colonial nation that hates our guts. He should, for the sake of his people’s dignity, not kow-tow to any other nation – especially one that still overplays a terrible incident in out colonial history. A shameful incident, but one, which in its seriousness, is ill-compared to the brutalities that exist in India today.

            Amritsar was a criminal act that was never punished by the British. But to keep it alive 94 years after it took place to remind  the Indian people of Britain’s “cruelties” to this very day, is a stain upon future relationships between the two nations. But to Cameron, after Bloody Sunday and Hillsborough, it is becoming second nature for a British prime minister to stand before parliament and apologise for their nation’s history.

            Cameron has been criticised in India for blocking Indian students from coming to the UK to study. But as Cameron pointed out, such applications were to colleges that did not exist.

            Yet Cameron, while unapologetic for such abuses of the system, still welcomes Indian students to study at our better accredited universities. In other words, we are educating our competitors, in order that they can go home, in this case to India, but also to any other once colonised nation, and use the knowledge and skills that our premier universities have taught them, in order to benefit their nation’s advancement at the expense of our own. If India does not see this as sufficient payment for Amritsar, then I know not what else will suffice.

WE ARE FOREVER apologising for our past, when in fact such admissions of guilt are not required by the facts. We once were (I hesitate to say still are) a great nation on the stage of human history. There is nothing to apologise for. If we in some way carried out acts of injustice toward any of our colonies, then they were a meagre serving compared to what these cultures readily served up to their own people before our arrival.

While this does not justify our cruelties as an imperial power; it certainly should add a new perspective to what was happening before we arrived; which has never been considered in the modern age of the liberal imperium.

Our youth have, since the mid 1960s, been nursed into imperial guilt, especially at university level. It has continued up to today. But it has spread beyond academia into all levels of education to this day, where the virus has been well established into the age of the liberal imperium.

The liberal imperium requires confession after confession; and whatever our one-time colonies see fit to demand from us in the way of recompense, the imperium is all too ready to oblige. Thus we see a British prime minister, in effect, apologising for our past. It is better to starve than go cap in hand, as it appears David Cameron has done with regard to his visit to India.

Our nation’s decline is exemplified by Cameron’s humiliating behaviour on the Indian continent. If a nation  has to apologise for its past, it is truly a nation in decline: and so it appears when we have to go begging to a one time colony for business; especially after the colony has already struck up a military deal with France in preference to the UK, thus teasing us as mere supplicants to plead our case.

The Amritsar regret is the minimal requirement the Indians found was needed from David Cameron in order to qualify for Indian business orders. If this does not represent a once proud nation now in decline; I do not know what is.