From India-The dramatic image flashed across the world. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Protestant church in England and spiritual leader of the global community of 85 million Anglican Christians, lay prostrate in front of the memorial to the victims massacred a century ago by troops of the British Indian army in Amritsar. It was, as he intended, a visible symbol of repentance for an action that since 1919 has left a stain on Britain’s relations with India.
It was not a formal apology. The most revered Justin Welby said that he was a religious and not a political leader, and therefore could not speak for Britain or its government. But he condemned the shootings as a crime and a sin, and said he was “personally very sorry for this terrible atrocity”. He felt a “deep sense of shame” when visiting the Jallianwala Bagh park.
His prostration, in the searing heat, was compared by many to the gesture of repentance by Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor, who spontaneously fell to his knees in 1970 in front of the former Jewish ghetto in Warsaw when he offered an apology for the Nazi atrocities committed there during the Second World War.
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https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/the-jallianwala-bagh-stain-archbishop-of-canterburys-act-of-repentance-speaks-to-his-larger-project-of-interfaith-reconciliation/
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