This was an act of ritual mourning. Mourning is an act of memory. Mourning is remembrance, it is longing, an expression of irreparable loss. It is cathartic and hence healing. But mourning allows one to move forward, while keeping the memory of loss alive. Such ritualised mourning also signals a closure. It sets the dead free and unburdens the living. Kevin Rudd not only allowed the dead to go on their onwards journey, he also freed the living from guilt.

Repentance requires capacity and possibility for reflection and recognition of a moral space within each one of us, howsoever fragile. In our times, repentance remains a personal moral category. It is a personal virtue. We have the politics of hatred, of memory, of historical injustices but not of repentance. But is it necessary, we may ask, that repentance too becomes a political category?

This apology is an affirmation of the moral realm. Kevin Rudd, and with him the entire Australian Parliament, by this act reiterated that the true basis of the polity and civilised conduct is morality. In terms of its moral innovativeness it has only one recent parallel, that of the Truth And Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. The solemnity and poignancy of it communicated the power of symbolic acts in public realm. In a world which recognises and celebrates the power of ‘brands’ and is sceptical of symbolic acts it comes as a powerful reminder of the potency of acts — however symbolic — done with pure intent and clear conscience.

... contd.