1919 massacre reflected ‘philosophy of British rule’

New Delhi, August 8

Noting that those were the difficult days, Indian Council Cultural Relations (ICCR) president and Rajya Sabha member Vinay Sahasrabuddhe on Wednesday said Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh incident brought out “the philosophy of the British rule” in India.

Inaugurating the curtain raiser exhibition on “Remembering the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre-100 years after”, which will later be opened in Amritsar’s Partition Museum in full scale, Sahasrabuddhe told a gathering here that the event that unfolded on and after April 13, 1919, has a message for all that patriotism is “not a mere slogan, rather we need to live it in our daily lives”.

As the event was to mark the different aspects of what had happened on April 13, 1919 — "what we have forgotten, what we remember-one hundred year later”, special readings were done on the “legal testimonies”.

Later, Lord Meghnad Desai and Chief Economic Adviser Sanjeev Sanyal joined Sasrabuddhe in a panel discussion, where the speakers were unanimous in claiming that a lot of “facts are missing in history textbooks”.

Sanyal said freedom was not attained only by Indian National Congress, rather efforts of revolutionaries like Ras Bihari Bose and others added up to British discomfiture to leave India. Lord Desai rued the fact that British House of Lords did not condemn General Dyer. — TNS