Amritsar and Our Duty to India (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI THE "BLACK" BILLS Probably few people in Great Britain are well acquainted with the nature of the provisions of the Rowlatt Bills, or have any more than a vague idea about them as some repressive legislation which Indian agitators regarded as obnoxious. It has been said often enough by officials in India, by the Anglo-Indian Press and in telegrams sent to this country by Anglo- Indian correspondents, that the Bills were "wickedly misrepresented" on the platform in India. The fact is, that the provisions are so iniquitous in themselves that it would be extremely difficult to misrepresent them as anything worse than they are. Generally speaking, any proposals to place larger powers in the hands of the police are sufficient to create panic in the minds of the Indian populace, and they have had plenty of experience of the ruthless, cruel use which can be and is made of repressivelegislation, which, of course, is always passed for purposes of temporary emergency and to deal with particular classes of persons, but has a habit of becoming permanent and applying itself in a generous and widespread fashion to all sorts of purposes and people. Executive authority does not easily surrender the powers it has once wielded, nor is it easily deterred from using for one purpose powers which were ostensibly given to it by the Legislature for another, if there is nothing in the letter of the law to prevent it. And in India, Executive authority, responsible only to a Parliament seven thousand miles away, which does not hear of happenings in India for eight months and sometimes longer, is naturally less scrupulous than in countries where it can be called quickly to account by those who have in their own hands the power of censure and punishment. The Press Act and the Defence of India...