India has placed enormous value on repentance from the time of the Ramayana; the epic itself owes its origin to its author’s feeling of contrition. But censuring oneself is one thing, and forcing innocents to express regret for what previous generations have done, quite another.

Demands for an apology from the British for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre on its centenary fall in the second category. Not only is the current generation of UK’s leaders not responsible, they weren’t even born when General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to open fire. So an apology, even if it were ever to come, would be one obtained under duress.

Moreover, it could be artificial and offered with a view to extracting benefits, diplomatic or in some other way. India is an economic power, a market the West can’t ignore, and the number of Indians living in the UK is significant enough to tilt electoral outcomes at least in some constituencies. Why simply help some British or Indian-origin UK politicians to burnish their image, or those from India on the foreign seminar circuit gain more social media followers?

Even if the expression of regret isn’t merely formal or dishonest, it’s hard to see how it would be anything other than a gimmick. A hundred years have gone by, and no one thought it fit to say sorry until now. Twice, when Queen Elizabeth came to India in 1997 and David Cameron visited the Bagh in 2013, there were calls for an apology, and both voiced their regret but stopped short of saying sorry.

British PM Theresa May has now called the incident a “shameful scar on British Indian history”. That’s a decent statement, and there’s just no need to push for anything more. The last thing we need is a gimmick that demeans a colossal human tragedy.

There’s a more fundamental reason to not go looking for an apology. It’s that it will allow Dyer to be portrayed as an exception to the ‘rule’ of the so-called British sense of ‘fair play and justice’ and unwittingly validate Winston Churchill’s disingenuous description of the massacre as “without precedent or parallel” and “singular” in the Empire’s history.

Barbaric no doubt, Dyer’s deed doesn’t stand in isolation at all. Summary executions of Indians had taken place more than 60 years before the Baisakhi horror, during suppression of the 1857 revolt; these were repeated during the Kuka uprisings later.

Massive atrocities were committed by British officials in the final decade of the 19th century in the name of fighting plague: checks in homes were invasive, women and children were harassed and humiliated, property was taken away forcibly and entire families were rendered homeless. And in the very year in which Jallianwala happened, hundreds of Indians were being subjected to the cruellest treatment in the dark, dank prison cells of Port Blair while the London government was busy publicly proclaiming the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms.

The volume of noise created by a renewed push for a mea culpa actually takes away from the need to take a serious look at the methods of colonial repression. It obstructs any meaningful discussion on the loot of subject nations by Empire builders, the fear that laws aimed at colonised societies spawned in the hearts of people – as the proposed Rowlatt bills did in Punjab in 1919 – and the crushing of fundamental human rights by colonial administrators. In short, it’s an empty distraction that helps the real colonial-era offenders get away with their sordid catalogue of wrongdoing.

Add to this the fact that hardly any wounds could be healed by fresh expressions of remorse. The directly affected generation is long gone, and the UK is understandably wary of reparations or financial claims, because such claims couldn’t be restricted to 1919 or even to just one kind of British Raj conduct.

Phoney claims about Dyer’s way “not being the British way of doing business” (Churchill’s line in 1919) and attempts by new-age apologists of the Empire to portray it as a torchbearer of civilisation are best combated by throwing further light on facts and taking the lid off attempts to create a smokescreen. It could be further challenged by a sincere remembrance of all those who suffered and died – and by grieving for them.