British prime minister David Cameron’s semi-apology during his visit to Jallianwala Bagh massacre memorial on Wednesday has been criticised by newspapers today. They, as well as the news channels, wanted nothing less than a full and formal one.

Fine.

But why not a few apologies preceding Jallianwala?

On March 22, 1739, Nadir Shah, the Shah of Iran (1736–47) and founder of the Afsharid dynasty, invaded India – then ruled by the pusillanimous Mughal ruler Mohammad Shah – with a 55,000-strong army, and issued orders for a general massacre in Delhi. According to details in the contemporary chronicles such as Tarikh-e-Hindi of Rustam Ali, Bayan-e-Waqai of Abdul Karim and Tazkira of Anand Ram Mukhlis, somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 men, women and children were slaughtered by the Persian troops during the massacre which lasted for a few hours.

“Here and there some opposition was offered,” says Tazkira, “but in most places people were butchered unresistingly. The Persians laid violent hands on everything and everybody. For a long time, streets remained strewn with corpses, as the walks of a garden with dead leaves and flowers. The town was reduced to ashes.” The plunder seized from India was so rich that Nadir stopped taxation in Iran for a period of three years following his return.

In recent times, India-Iran ties have always been cordial with dignitaries from both sides visiting each other frequently. Has India ever sought an apology or Iran tendered one for what happened 274 years ago?

Going further back into history will bring out invasions and following massacres and plunders of Muhammad of Ghur, Mahmud of Ghazni, et cetera.

Will an apology by anyone from the respective nationalities of these invaders be able to undo the suffering of our ancestors?

Will it set the records straight?

Then we have our own part of apologies to tender.

On March 13, 1940, almost 21 years after the Jallianwala massacre, Udham Singh – who was witness to the massacre as he along with fellow boys from his orphanage in Amritsar were serving water to protesters when the firing began – killed Lieutenant General Michael O Dwyer, who was then the governor of Punjab and had justified his junior Brigadier General Reginald EH Dyer’s order of shooting at Jallianwala Bagh, at Caxton Hall in London. Udham Singh was caught and hanged on July 31, 1940. Do we need to offer an apology to Dwyer’s family?  

While Churchill called the Jallianwala massacre as “monstrous”, former PM Asquith called it “one of the worst outrages in the whole of our history”. However, the brute of Amritsar, General Dyer, remained unapologetic throughout. The British-appointed Hunter Commission did not impose any penal or disciplinary action because Dyer’s actions were condoned by various superiors (primarily including Michael O’ Dwyer). He was finally found guilty of a mistaken notion of duty (the commission found that he sensed an uprising where there was none) and relieved of his command on March 23, 1919. On his return to England, while Dyer was criticised by one section, he was praised by another as the “saviour of Punjab”. He was presented with a purse of 26,000 pounds sterling, a huge sum in those days, which emerged from a collection on his behalf by the Morning Post, a conservative, pro-Imperialistic newspaper.

India had its own share of change of opinions on Udham Singh’s retaliatory action. While in March 1940, Jawahar Lal Nehru, along with Mahatma Gandhi, had condemned the action of Udham Singh as senseless; in 1962, Nehru did an about turn and applauded Singh, saying: “I salute Shaheed-i-Azam Udham Singh with reverence who had kissed the noose so that we may be free.”

History does not allow cross-period dialogues which can set the records straight. And massacres are not controversies for which apologies can be tendered. In asking for these, in a way, we are offending our own ancestors who endured pain with courage and suffered. Let us not mix and match our history, freedom struggle, and martyrs with ‘sorry’s’ and smileys.