Mr. HARTLEY KENNEDY
[Photograph taken 20 years after retirement]
CHAPTER VII
Mr. Hartley Kennedy, C.S.I.
1899-1901
When Mr. Vincent left India at the end of 1898, to spend the remainder of his days in Switzerland, he was succeeded by Mr. Hartley Kennedy of the Bombay District Police. Mr. Kennedy took charge of the Commissioner’s office on January 9th, 1899. Like his predecessor, he had to reckon with the continued presence of plague, and also with the effect upon the urban police administration of severe famine in various districts of the Presidency. These natural disasters synchronized with a severe slump in the Bombay textile industry, due chiefly to over-production and the consequent glutting of the China market, which at that date absorbed the bulk of the Bombay mill-products. According to a leading mill-owner, the industry in 1899 was in a most critical position; nearly all the mills were closed on three days in the week, and some had altogether ceased working. A strike of mill-hands was threatened, which the Police were called upon, and managed, to settle before it came to a head. The position of affairs in 1901 was very little better.
The police were thus faced with an abnormal volume of crime resulting from disease, starvation and unemployment. In 1899 two real dacoities of the type common in up-country districts, perpetrated probably by Pardesis from Northern India, occurred in the suburbs and obliged the Commissioner to establish night-patrols of mounted and foot police in the north of the Island. The following year witnessed a marked increase of crime against property, resulting from high prices and unemployment. Famine-conditions were responsible for an abnormal number of cases of exposure of infants in 1899 and for many instances of robbery by means of dhatura poisoning in 1900. But, apart from these temporary symptoms of economic disorder, the last decade of the nineteenth century witnessed a steady increase of cases of all kinds under the Indian Penal Code and miscellaneous laws. Cases under the Police Act would probably have shown a similar upward tendency, but for the fact that prosecutions were purposely avoided, in deference to the reluctance of the Presidency Magistrates to convict offenders on the sole evidence of police witnesses. It has always been difficult to find private persons willing to appear in court and give evidence in such matters.
As in most parts of India, the number of false complaints brought to the police was considerable, many of these cases falling within the category of “maliciously false”. The Commissioner estimated the proportion of false to true cases in 1900 at one in 375. The false complaint, supported by false evidence, has been a feature of the criminal administration of India from early days and adequately explains the reason why Europeans have always clung so strenuously to the right, secured to them by the criminal law, of being tried by a jury containing a majority of their own countrymen. It is the only safeguard they possess against false prosecution and illegal conviction. Some such protection for the European minority is essential in a country, where the administration of justice by Indian courts has not reached so high and detached a level as it has in England.
The year 1901 was prolific of murders, twenty-one cases being investigated by the police. Among the chief causes célèbres was the murder in the streets by followers of H. H. the Aga Khan of certain Khojas belonging to the Asna Ashariya section, which had announced its determination to secede from the main body of Khojas. The precise reason for the murders is unknown. They may have been decided upon by one of the factions as a protest against the constant absences of H. H. the Aga Khan, or on the other hand may have been intended by the party which supported His Highness as a celebration of his safe return from abroad. Faction feeling in the community was at the time running high, and the more fanatical of the Aga Khan’s followers were incensed with those Khojas who were disinclined to subscribe blindly to the opinions on communal matters held by the more conservative section. His Highness himself, who happened to be in Europe on one of his periodical visits, had no knowledge whatever of the murder-plot; otherwise his influence would certainly have been directed towards restraining the fury of his Ismailia followers. He himself was much perturbed by the tragedy and gave Mr. Kennedy every assistance in the enquiry which followed. The three victims were stabbed to death in the streets, almost at the moment of his arrival, and the police found their time fully occupied in trying to calm the passions thus aroused. The murders produced such rancour between the Ismailia and the Asna Ashariya Khojas that, for many years afterwards, the police were obliged to prohibit the funerals of the latter passing through the recognized Khoja quarters to their separate grave-yard in Mazagon. It was not until 1913 that the Commissioner found himself justified in relaxing the more stringent precautions, owing to the passage of time and the prevalence of a better feeling between the two sections of Khojas. The knives, with which the murders were committed, were preserved for many years in one of the lockers in the inner room of the Commissioner’s office, and were handed over to the Criminal Investigation Department as an exhibit for the museum, when that branch was reorganized in 1910.