The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott Page A

do is admit it, just say Hard Luck to the chap who shoots too many, and see to it that the women and children who lost their menfolk, or the children who lost their parents don’t starve. There were kids who got shot too, weren’t there, at Amritsar? What do we owe them?’
    She paid the £100 to one Sir Ahmed Akbar Ali Kasim, a wealthy Ranpur Muslim, one of her late husband’s Indian colleagues on the provincial governor’s executive council, whose son Mohammed Ali had already shown brilliance in his chosen profession, the law, and was inspired that year of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre to join the Congress Party whose aim in that same year and for the same bloody reasons and under M. K. Gandhi’s leadership was reversed from independence by peaceful co-operation to independence as soon as possible by non co-operation.
    ‘You are young,’ Sir Ahmed Akbar told his son. ‘Your heart is stronger than your head. When you are as old as I am you will not be so confused by these emotional issues. You think Jallianwallah was a new experience? You are wrong. You think the Indian Congress can ensure that it will be the last episode of this kind? You will be wrong again. You think Jallianwallah proves that the British are lying, talking freedom but acting tyrannically and dealing destruction? Again you are wrong. Jallianwallah could never have happened if the British who talk freedom were not sincere. It happened because they are sincere. They have frightened their opponents with their sincerity. I do not mean us. We are not their opponents. Their opponents, the ones who matter but who will matter less and less, are also British. They are men like General Dyer. Why do you call that man a monster? He believed God had charged him with a duty to save the empire. He believed this sincerely, just as he believed sincerely that in Amritsar there was to be found an invidious threat to that empire. Why do you repeat parrot-fashion that the English are hypocrites? With this you can never charge them. You can only charge them with sincerity and of being divided among themselves about what it is right to be sincere about. It is only an insincere people that can be accused of hyprocrisy. Sometimes I think we are the hypocrites becausewe have lived too long as a subject people to remember what sincerity means, or to know from one day to the next what we believe in.
    ‘Look’ (the old man said, and showed Mohammed Ali a slip of paper), ‘do you know what this is? It is a cheque for the rupee equivalent of one hundred pounds made out in my name by an Englishwoman. In exchange for it I am charged to send my own draft to the fund for the Jallianwallah widows and orphans, and not to reveal the name of the donor. Perhaps you think this smells a bit of hypocrisy. To me it smells only of sincerity. It is a straw in the wind which proves to me that for a long time I have been correct in my forecast of which way the wind would blow.
    ‘You look at the English people you meet. Some of them you like. Some you hate. Many you are indifferent to. But even the ones you like do not matter. The ones who matter you will never see – they are tucked away in England – and they are indifferent to us as individuals. You think these officials over here rule us? These viceroys, these governors, these commissioners and commanders-in-chief and brigadier-generals? Then you are wrong. We are ruled by people who do not even know where Ranpur is. But now they know where Jallianwallah Bagh is and what it is, and many of them do not like what they know. Those of them who do like what they know are the ones you hear about and hear from. Like the General at Amritsar they are frightened people and frightened people shriek the loudest and fire at random.
    ‘Ah, well, they were Indians who actually died at Amritsar, but the Jallianwallah Bagh was also the scene of a suicide. There will be other such scenes. It takes a long time for a new nation to be born, and a long