Congress MP and author Shashi Tharoor on Sunday said that the British should apologise for their wrongs committed on Indians during their rule and the Jalianwala Bagh centenary in 2019 will be a good time to do that.
He was launching his new book ‘An Era of Darkness: The British Empire In India’ at the Kolkata Literary Festival-2017. The book “goes into some detail about the nature of British rule in India — the financial and the expropriations. “It also takes up the various arguments in favour of the empire and discredits them,” he said.
According to him the British have brushed it under the carpet. The British also romanticise with their past of colonising countries in the past he said. Quoting some examples given in the preface of his book he said that Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also apologised for the 1914 Komagata Maru incident where hundreds of Hindu, Sikh and Mulsim immigrants were denied entry into Canada and turned away from the port of Vancouver and they faced a violent fate when they returned to India.
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Tharoor said, “London would not look like London today without the resources that were looted from India and from the other colonies.” According to him reparations particularly were not of great interest to him, in the sense that he doesn’t think one can calculate the loss and damage done in any reasonable terms today.
“Any sum that is credible to make up for the damage and the loot would not be payable and any sum that is payable would not be credible,” Tharoor said. According to him things would be fine once such an apology is made.The British edition of the book will be out on March 2 this year.
