XIII
THE PUNJAB
We may now consider the case of the Punjab. Lord Morley’s verdict notwithstanding, it is abundantly clear that the troubles of 1907, with which the history of unrest in the Punjab begins, were principally agrarian in their origin. Lord Morley’s speech in the House of Commons (in 1907) as to the root of the trouble was based on reports supplied to him by the Government of the Punjab and we know from personal knowledge how unreliable many of these reports are. We may here illustrate this point by a few extracts from these documents.
(1) Lord Morley stated that: “There were twenty-eight meetings known to have been held by the leading agitators in the Punjab between 1st March and 1st May. Of these five only related, even ostensibly, to agricultural grievances; the remaining twenty-three were all purely political.”
The number of meetings held from March 1 to May 1, 1907 was, at the lowest calculation, at least double of 28, or perhaps treble, and most of them related “even ostensibly to agricultural grievances”; the number of purely political meetings could not have exceeded ten or twelve.
(2) On p. 61 the committee writes that “Chatarji’s father too had ordered him home on discovering that he was staying with Hardayal in the house of Lajpat Rai.” The whole of this statement is absolutely false. I am prepared to swear and to prove that Chatarji did not stay in my house even for a single night. He came there a few times with Hardayal. Hardayal was at that time living in a house he had rented for himself in the native city about one mile from my place which is in the Civil Station on the Lower Mall.
On the same page the committee has approvingly quoted a sentence from the judgment of the Sessions Judge in the Delhi Conspiracy Case. Speaking of Amir Chand, one of the accused in that case who was sentenced to death, the Sessions Judge describes him as “one who spent his life in furthering murderous schemes which he was too timid to carry out himself.” Now I happen to have known this man for about 20 years before his conviction. I have no doubt that he was rightly convicted in this case but I have no doubt also that this description of him by the Sessions Judge was absolutely wrong. Up till 1910 the man had led an absolutely harmless life, helping students in their studies and otherwise rendering assistance, according to his means, to other needy people. No one ever credited him with violent views. His revolutionary career began in 1908. Before that he could not and would not have tolerated even the killing of an ant, much less that of human beings.
In governments by bureaucracies one of the standing formulas of official etiquette is never to question the findings of facts arrived at by your superiors or predecessors. This naturally leads to the perpetuation of mistakes. A wrong conclusion once accepted continues to be good for all times to come. The Rowlatt Committee has studiously acted on that formula throughout its present inquiry. They have invariably accepted the findings of executive and judicial authorities preceding them about the incidents that happened since 1907, without making any independent inquiry of their own. Hence their opinion about the original or the principal cause of the unrest of 1907 in the Punjab is not entitled to greater weight than that of the Punjab officials whose mishandling of the affairs of the province produced the unrest. One ounce of fact, however, is of greater weight in the determination of issues than even a hundred theories. The fact that the Government of India had to veto the Punjab Government’s Land Colonies Act in order to allay the unrest proves conclusively that the unrest was due to agrarian trouble.
The unrest of 1907 subsided after the repeal of the land legislation of 1907, but the legacy it left is still operative.