On November 28, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologised to LGBTQ+ public servants for decades of “state-sponsored, systematic oppression and rejection.”
On December 6, on the 25th year of the demolition of Babri Masjid, Yogi Adityanath, holder of a high constitutional office, made these shocking comments: “It is on this day in 1992 that karsevaks showed the might of Hindu forces, something that had been kept suppressed for years…”
If there is one word which is alien to the political sphere in India, it is the word apology. Heads of government, ministers, powerful politicians, are absolutely loath to offer any apology even if they, their party, or their governments are in the wrong for acts of commission and omission. Sometimes, their actions have caused grievous consequences like the aftermath of the Masjid demolition which not only led to the deaths of more than 2000 people in riots, but also almost irreparable fissures in India’s secular polity.
This is not an aberration.
Consider, the entire demonetisation exercise. While the government celebrated its one-year anniversary as an anti-corruption day, it completely obscured the immense difficulties caused by it through the loss of livelihoods for millions of people. More importantly, it failed to acknowledge the deaths of over hundred people. An apology, at least, in this regard, was absolutely a moral imperative.
‘A natural calamity’
Or, consider, the recent Gorakhpur tragedy, in which more than 70 children died due to sheer state negligence. While expecting the government to take moral responsibility and ask ministers to resign would be a tall order, even a simple apology has become so. Even worse, instead of an apology, what was seen in the wake of the tragedy was apologia for the gross negligence. The prime minister called it a “natural calamity,” while the president of the ruling party said that for “a big country like India,” such tragedies are not uncommon.
Apologia for some of the catastrophic State excesses have similarly been witnessed in the recent decades from the 1984 anti-Sikh riots to the 2002 Gujarat riots. Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi justified 1984 by arguing that “when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little,” while Prime Minister Modi, as Gujarat Chief Minister, made the infamous comparison of the victims of the 2002 massacre with a puppy coming under a car. Also, in his words, “One only has to ask for forgiveness if one is guilty of a crime.”
Brazenness, while wielding state power and in the face of heinous crimes is the order of the day. That is why the rare exception is almost shocking. Atal Bihari Vajpayee did apologise for failing to prevent the demolition of Babri Masjid. Manmohan Singh, as Prime Minister, and on behalf of the Congress Party, apologised for 1984, a significant gesture. Recently, in August, on a much lesser level, Kerala Chief Minister, Pinarayi Vijayan apologised to the family of a Tamil migrant worker who lost his life after at least four hospitals in Kerala denied him treatment.
Different democracy
Nevertheless, Vajpayee’s apology (to an English television channel in a pre-television era with no wider public import) was empty, for this was not his party’s view, and he was also one of the 68 people named as responsible for the demolition by the Inquiry Commission. And Singh’s apology came after an official commission indicted Congress party leaders. While the Kerala Chief Minister’s apology was not forced, it is not that the Left parties themselves have not succumbed to the seductions of power politics by normalising the deaths of human beings and avoiding responsibility. His apology has to be seen as more of a reflection of Kerala’s substantively different democracy, which seeks greater accountability from its government.
It is here that the Indian political and public sphere is so drastically different from other democracies elsewhere. Expressing remorse and seeking forgiveness is not a rarity anymore in them. Tony Blair, as Prime Minister, made the first formal apology for Britain’s role in Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s.
The New Zealand governments have apologised to the Maori tribes for colonial injustices and atrocities. Trudeau also apologised earlier for the Komagata Maru incident of 1914 in which Sikh and other Indian passengers were denied entry into Canada. He also recently apologised to LGBT people for “state-sponsored (and) systematic oppression.” But the most comprehensive apology has been the series of expressions of remorse from various Japanese governments over the years from the 1970s for colonialism which included sex slavery and so on. As Prime Minister Shinzo Abe noted: Japan “did inflict immeasurable damage and suffering” on “innocent people.”
But the inability of our political class to take moral responsibility for their actions, or the government’s, is an illustration of the deteriorating nature of the public sphere (and the larger society) in the ethics of right and wrong even where there is an expansion of democracy in certain senses.
While the marginalised classes themselves become more assertive, those in power have managed to appropriate their democratic impulses for anti-democratic and majoritarian causes. These are expressed often in violent, and uncivil ways, where the word apology does not figure. The word apology (with its origins in the Greek word apologia ) before, ironically, meant justification of one’s actions and words rather than seeking of forgiveness.
Thus, Socrates refusal to apologise during the trial conducted by the state against him for many charges which included being a “corrupter of the youth” is one famous example of apology in the original sense.
Absolutely blatant
The blatant refusal of the Indian political leadership to tender apologies for political and administrative acts/omissions with dangerous consequences, and yet the claiming of the moral high ground might even seem Socratic.
But Socrates, unlike our political leaders, was — as Plato recounts in his work, Apology of Socrates — speaking from a position of weakness against the power of the state.
Further, he chose to stand by what he believed in by accepting the punishment of death: “A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong.”
If Socrates considered himself as a “gadfly” “fastening upon… arousing and persuading and reproaching”, the state which is like “a great and noble steed,” our political class uses the power of the state to mask the excesses committed in its name.
Of course, apology can never be a substitute for actual justice, and without the latter, can turn hollow. Apology which is not followed up intent to prevent the same act (like the many Hindutva-sponsored communal riots even after the Babri Masjid demolition) is a farce.
Apology cannot bring back the lives of people lost or erase the trauma caused in political carnages of the past. This was painfully demonstrated in the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in South Africa to establish the horrors of Apartheid, to give even the perpetrators of ghastly crimes a chance to apologise and seek forgiveness.
But, the restorative process of reconciliation can leave some survivors with the feeling of being denied justice, unlike the retributive mechanism, for instance, seen in the UN Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia which indicted the last war criminal on November 22.
Then, there is the material aspect of justice. Along with the apologies, the New Zealand government initiated a multibillion dollar reparative process which a United Nations report termed as “one of the most important examples in the world of an effort to address historical and ongoing grievances of indigenous peoples.”
In India, we are not seeking anything close to this, but a mere apology and there is a lot to apologise for. Yet, as Yogi Adityanath’s hailing of a criminal act shows, when not tendering an apology is itself the basis of the political class’ power, apologia becomes a terrifying reality.
@nmannathukkaren is Chair, International Development Studies Department, Dalhousie University, Canada.
