The Rediff Interview/K P S Gill

'The queen's visit eventually is just an empty gesture'

KP S Gill, former Punjab director general of police and the newly appointed security adviser to the Assam government, tells Archana Masih in a faxed interview why he believes the storm over Queen Elizabeth's visit to Amritsar and the demand for an apology for the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre is a meaningless controversy.

Do you agree with the PM's initial view that the queen should delete Amritsar from her itinerary?

Emphatically not. I think the issue has been blown out of proportion. These things can and should be handled with greater maturity. The queen should visit Amritsar, Bhagat Singh's nephew should be allowed his two minutes of fame and be permitted to present a petition to one of her authorised representatives.

The freedom fighters and survivors of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre who wish to hold a black flag demonstration should be provided with appropriate space to demonstrate in a civilised fashion against some of the uglier aspects of colonialism, and Sir David Gore-Booth (the British high commissioner) should be given an opportunity to expound further on what he euphemistically describes as the 'sadness of history'.

Ultimately, you will find that if the visit does come through, the biggest problems that the administration will face will not be Bhagat Singh's nephew or black flag demonstrations, but the tremendous crowds trying to catch a glimpse of the Queen, and the phalanx of Akalis who will try to squeeze themselves into every frame and photograph with her when she takes a walk around the parikrama.

What do you think prompted the PM to take this stance?

I think the PM is perfectly capable of explaining his own motives and is quite accessible to the media, so this question would be best addressed to him.

Do you think the Queen should apologise for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre?

What I think or what anyone else in India thinks is hardly relevant. It's what she freely thinks that matters. Even if political pressure could extract an apology from her, it would be meaningless unless it was inspired by her own sense of a grave wrong for which she, on behalf of the British nation, felt responsible.

During her visit to Amritsar, according to the original programme, she was to have gone to Jallianwalla Bagh and to have placed a wreath at the martyrs memorial there. To my mind, this would have been no less than an apology. But even if the quibbles did prevail, and the queen utters the words 'I'm sorry', I'm not sure this would even begin to right the wrongs and the injustices of a hundred years of colonial exploitation.

Seventyeight years after the incident, do you think a gesture like this is really necessary as an act of atonement? The Indian freedom struggle is full of innumerable sacrifices, many excesses by the British; is it wise to have the perpetrators of crimes committed generations ago apologise to us now?

As I said before, if the act is motivated by real feelings of regret it may have some meaning. If it is prompted by considerations of diplomacy or of political pressure or expediency, it would, in fact, detract from the more real issues of reparations or of the restoration of cultural artifacts and national treasures which have been plundered.

But even here, it must be understood, demands by individuals for the restoration of particular heirlooms are meaningless, they are nothing but ploys to secure a little cheap publicity. Had there been any seriousness attending these, there would have been long-term efforts to mobilise public opinion to pressurise the Indian government to take up this demand in a systematic manner and at a more opportune moment.

These are issues that have to be worked out at a government to government level. Somebody standing along the queen's route with a placard saying "Give us our Koh-i-Noor," may get his picture in the newspapers. But that would be the sum total of his achievement. Of course, for a lot of people, that is the culmination of all their ambitions.

Do you think an apology could be seen as an act of goodwill, and in turn would help raise the stature of the queen among the Indian people in a humane sort of way?

In the absence of any radical improvement in our trade relations, or of the upgradation of Indian issues in the list of British priorities, I think it would fail to rise above the level of a spectacle -- mildly embarrassing to the queen, mildly and temporarily satisfying to some of the smaller minds in India, but eventually, just an empty gesture.

In fact, this is true of the queen's visit to India in its entirety. The visit of any head of state or government is no more than a grand spectacle, unless it is accompanied by a significant and quantifiable changes in relations between nations.

It will be a slightly greater spectacle in this case, since a significant segment of our population is still obsessed with British royalty. But once her tour of India is over, we will go right back to cursing British colonialism (or, in some cases, romanticising it). Apology or no apology.

What do you foresee as the outcome to this statement by Mr Gujral? Is there really a controversy in this?

The immediate outcome appears to be that the queen's visit to Amritsar has become uncertain. As for the controversy, I think a certain group of politicians in Punjab are going to discover their favourite 'brahmanical conspiracy' at Delhi as being responsible for the attempt to 'deprive' them of the 'honour' of this visit, and are going to keep talking of this 'evidence' of continuing 'oppression' at every possible occasion over the next ten years.

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