Jallianwala Bagh killings deeply shameful: Cameron

Nearly 94 years after over 1,000 Indian protesters were killed at Jallianwalla Bagh during the British Raj, Prime Minister David Cameron today described the incident as “deeply shameful” but stopped short of a public apology.

Cameron, the first British prime minister to visit the 1919 massacre site, knelt while paying tribute to martyrs and observed one-minute silence with folded hands as a mark of respect.

Writing in the visitors’ book, Cameron said, “This was a deeply shameful act in the British history, one that Winston Churchill rightly described at that time as “monstrous”. We must never forget what happened here, and we must ensure that the UK stands up for the right of peaceful protests around the world”.

Some organisations had pressed for an apology from the British premier during his visit to the site. The gesture, coming on the third and final day of a visit to India aimed at drumming up trade and investment, is seen as an attempt to improve relations with Britain’s former colonial possession and to court around 1.5 million British voters of Indian origin ahead of a 2015 election. Before his visit, Cameron said there were ties of history between the two countries, “both the good and the bad”.  

Cameron has said the two countries enjoy a “special relationship”— a term usually reserved for Britain’s relations with the United States. For now, Britain’s economy is the sixth largest in the world and India’s the 10th. But India is forecast to overtake its old colonial master in the decades ahead and London wants to share in that economic success.

Visiting Pakistan in 2011, Cameron angered traditionalists at home, saying Britain had caused many of the world’s problems, including the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan.