Over a century after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, a UK MP has called for a formal British apology. But beyond the demand for accountability, there’s a forgotten Indian hero who fought for justice — Sir C. Sankaran Nair.
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00:00General Dyer, on behalf of the British Army, marched his troops in
00:04and ordered his troops to fire on those innocent people
00:07until they ran out of ammunition.
00:09Tory MP Bob Blackman said the Amritsar Massacre
00:12is a stain on British colonial rule in India.
00:15In 1919, the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre shocked the world.
00:18Hundreds of Indians were gunned down by General Dyer,
00:21but while outrage spread, few had the courage to directly challenge British rule.
00:25One man did, Sir C. Shankaran Nair.
00:28A brilliant lawyer and nationalist, Nair was no ordinary critic of the British.
00:32He was the first Indian to become the President of the Indian National Congress
00:36and later a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council,
00:39one of the highest positions an Indian could hold in the colonial government.
00:43But when Jallianwala Bagh happened, he resigned in protest,
00:46making him the only senior Indian official to do so.
00:49And he didn't stop there.
00:51Nair wrote Gandhi and Anarchy, a book that exposed British brutality,
00:55directly blaming British officials for the atrocities.
00:58The British were so enraged that they dragged him to court in London
01:02in a high-profile defamation case.
01:04But Nair fought back, proving that the so-called justice of the British Empire
01:08was nothing more than a facade.
01:10Despite his fearless stand, his name remains missing from most history books.
01:14Meanwhile, UK MP Bob Blackman has now called for a formal apology
01:18from the British government for the massacre.
01:20In 2019, then Prime Minister Theresa May called the killings
01:24a shameful scar in British Indian history,
01:26but stopped short of formally apologising.
01:29But while we demand an apology from Britain,
01:31isn't it time we recognised our own champions of justice?