Jalllianwala Bagh carnage shameful incident in British history: UK PM

(NewsBharati)

Amritsar, February 20: Regretting the Jalllianwala Bagh carnage, British Prime Minister David Cameron termed the 1919 massacre a shameful incident in British history.

Cameron visited Golden temple and Jalllianwala Bagh on Wednesday. He paid homage to unarmed civilians who lost their lives in rampage firing.  

Cameron is the first British Prime Minister to visit Jallianwala Bagh after 94 years of the incident. "This was a deeply shameful act in British history. One that Winston Churchil 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," Cameron wrote in the visitors book at Jallianwala Bagh.

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 India and to court around 1.5 million British voters of Indian origin ahead of a 2015 election. 

The 1919 slaughter, known in India as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, was described by Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the Indian independence movement, as having shaken the foundations of the British Empire. A group of soldiers opened fire on an unarmed crowd without warning in the northern Indian city after a period of unrest, killing hundreds in cold blood. 

The British report into the Amritsar massacre at the time said 379 people had been killed and 1,200 wounded. But a separate inquiry commissioned by the Indian pro-independence movement said around 1,000 people had been killed. 

Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, the man who gave the order to fire, explained his decision by saying he felt it was necessary to "teach a moral lesson to the Punjab". 

Other British politicians and dignitaries - though no serving prime minister - have expressed regret about the incident before. In 1920, Winston Churchill, then the Secretary of State for War, called the Amritsar massacre "a monstrous event", saying it was "not the British way of doing business".

On a visit to Amritsar in 1997, Queen Elizabeth called it a distressing episode, but said history could not be rewritten. However, her husband, Prince Philip, courted controversy during the visit when he questioned the higher Indian death toll.

Before he became prime minister, Tony Blair also visited, saying the memorial at Amritsar was a reminder of "the worst aspects of colonialism".