LAST Sunday the BBC reported the more and more violent sectarian clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, sparked by the results of a cricket match some weeks in the past on one other continent. With beautiful timing, a Sunday Occasions article by Sarfraz Manzoor informed us that ‘Now could be the time to acknowledge our empire’s sins’. He was prompted to jot down it after seeing the play Silence on the day our Queen died. It’s in regards to the bloodletting which resulted ‘from the tragedy of [Indian] partition – a mayhem made in Britain’. However this carnage was certainly not brought on by ‘our empire’.
The sub-continent’s pot of non secular hate had been effervescent away for many years in communities which usually rubbed alongside comparatively peaceably beneath British rule till February 1947 when, after years of campaigning by Gandhi and different Indian nationalists, Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee introduced Britain’s intention to depart India. The Indian Nationwide Congress and Muslim League led by Nehru and Jinnah respectively have been unable to succeed in settlement on a political construction after independence. Their failure turned up the warmth beneath more and more widespread violence and slaughter, a spreading wave of bloodletting that gained momentum and scale past something the British may hope to regulate as they withdrew, changing into a frenzy of butchery by either side which took a whole lot of 1000’s of lives and displaced thousands and thousands.
It wasn’t the British doing the looting, burning, raping and killing. Partitioned or not, as quickly because the British left, the lid would have come off the simmering pot of pent-up hate and blood would have flowed. So what does Manzoor need us to acknowledge? Are Britons in denial that the occasions earlier than, throughout and after partition have been horrific? No, after all not, however does he count on 21st century Brits to simply accept duty for carnage inflicted by Indians upon Indians? These crimes have been neither dedicated by us nor of our making. So why Manzoor thinks these are ‘our’ sins is unclear.
He additionally bemoans the dearth of an apology from the Queen for the 1919 Amritsar bloodbath, thereby by some means imparting guilt by affiliation to the monarch. Removed from not being acknowledged, the Amritsar bloodbath was the topic of fierce parliamentary and public debate and a authorities inquiry whose findings led to the accountable Common Dyer’s dismissal from the Military (although for contemporary sensibilities maybe a felony prosecution can be extra acceptable).
I for one am uninterested in Manzoor, Sathnam Sanghera, Afua Hirsch, David Olusoga, William Dalrymple et al, recurrently indulged by the BBC and others, telling 21st century Britons to confront perceived imperial and colonial wrongs with out ever trying to elucidate or present historic context for Britain’s (largely unintended) acquisition of an empire, apart from the implication that we possess an distinctive innate native wickedness and greed for which we should atone in perpetuity. Why do they do that, and to what finish?
If Manzoor must really feel contrite in regards to the sins of a colonial energy subjugating and oppressing an ethnic group, he would possibly wish to concentrate on more moderen atrocities dedicated by his native Pakistan in 1971, the yr of his start, when it waged a struggle in opposition to the individuals of Bengal, killing between 300,000 and three,000,000 Bangladeshis and driving thousands and thousands to hunt refuge in India (supply: BBC, Manzoor’s someday employer). Pakistan killed much more Bangladeshis in 9 months than Britain killed Indians in over 200 years. Or maybe he’d higher simply preserve quiet about it in case it opens a second ‘Muslim v Muslim’ entrance within the Leicester turf wars.
In 2007 I used to be dwelling and dealing in Mumbai when, throughout distinctive monsoon flooding within the metropolis, a TV information reporter quoted authorities who blamed the British for not constructing sufficient drains earlier than leaving 60 years earlier when the inhabitants was one sixth of what it could be in 2007. It’s time to cease the blame recreation and trying to impose guilt on 21st century Britons for wrongs, perceived and actual.
