It is pointless to apologise for Amritsar

SIR – There is no point in Britain apologising for the 1919 Amritsar massacre (Letter, April 3). In my view Britain should express regret instead, for regret expresses a wish that the event had not taken place, without any acceptance of wrongdoing on one’s part. An apology, on the other hand, amounts to an admission of guilt.

Regret, for example, would not be appropriate for crimes such as Japan’s mistreatment of Pows or the Turkish genocide of Armenians, for in these cases both states not only failed to protect victims, but also failed to punish the guilty. However, General Dyer, the man responsible for the Amritsar massacre, was duly charged and punished. Randhir Singh Bains

Gants Hill, Essex

SIR – I would like to make two points about Britain and India. On a recent visit to Mumbai, our guide said of Britain’s colonial past: “Without you we wouldn’t have a railway system, parks or a safe water system.”

At Sandhurst in the late Fifties, the Amritsar riots of 1919 were taught to show us how not to handle civil unrest. Malcolm Allen

Berkhamsted, Hertsfordshire

SIR – Chris Devine (Letters, April 8) should read Charles Allen’s devastating review in the Asian Affairs Journal last year of Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire. This pointed out that India’s leading economic historian, Professor Tirthankar Roy of the LSE, has discredited Tharoor’s “drain theory”, finding that “the share of India’s national income creamed off by the British Indian elite was too small to matter to Indian economic development either way”. Rupert Boswall

Staplehurst, Kent