The forgotten lawyer who took on the British after Jallianwala Bagh

India Today

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.

Transcript

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?

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