On several occasions Indian constables distinguished themselves by acts of bravery and examples of professional acumen. The detection of a burglary in the showroom of an English firm was due entirely to the action of a Hindu constable, who noticed on a piece of furniture the mark of a foot possessing certain peculiarities, which he remembered having seen before in the foot of an ex-convict. Another Hindu constable grappled with a European who had stabbed a townsman, and though severely wounded in the stomach and bleeding profusely, managed to pursue the offender and hold him down till help came. On three other occasions Indian constables sustained severe wounds, when grappling single-handed with armed Pathans and others, and on each occasion they clung to the prisoner until his arrest was secured. Several instances occurred of women and children being saved from drowning, and in two cases the men were rewarded with the bronze medal of the Royal Humane Society. The action of a young Hindu constable, who had been only three months in the force, deserves more detailed description. About 3 a.m. one morning in August, 1912, a Punjab Muhammadan murdered his comrade in a room in Bapty road. The murder was not discovered till some time afterwards. At 4 a.m. the constable on duty at the junction of Falkland and Foras roads saw a man hurrying in a suspicious manner through the shadows towards Gilder street. He stopped and questioned him; and, his suspicions being aroused, decided to search the man. The fugitive offered the constable a bribe of Rs. 5, Rs. 10 and finally Rs. 30 to let him go; but the constable arrested him and marched him to the Nagpada police station, where a report of the murder had by that time been received. It was then found that the arrested fugitive was the murderer, and that the money with which he had tried to bribe the constable was stained with blood and formed part of the sum which he had stolen from his victim. Further investigation proved beyond doubt that the murdered man had himself stolen the money from an Englishman in Mussoorie. A unique case, in which an accused asked permission of the Magistrate to pay a reward to the constable who arrested him, occurred in 1914. The prisoner, on being questioned, explained that, owing to his timely arrest, he had managed to retain possession of a sum of money, of which he would certainly have been robbed by the disorderly persons with whom he was consorting at the time the constable locked him up.
Among the special events of these years which imposed extra work for the time being on the Police were the Nasik murder and conspiracy trials in the High Court in 1910, the visit of Lord Minto in 1909, the arrival of Lord Hardinge and the visit of the ex-German Crown Prince in 1910, and the arrival of Lord Chelmsford in 1916. For the first time on record, the Mounted Police under their European officers were permitted to form part of the escort both of Lord Minto and the German Crown Prince, and, riding grey Arabs in their handsome full-dress uniform, they provided not the least showy part of the spectacle. These Viceregal progresses from the railway terminus or the Apollo Bandar to Malabar Hill had changed in character since the beginning of the twentieth century. Formerly the route chosen for the arrival of a new Viceroy or the departure of his predecessor lay as a matter of course through Kalbadevi road and Bhendy Bazaar, and thence by way of Grant road, or later Sandhurst road, to Chaupati and Walkeshwar. No particular precautions were taken, for none were deemed necessary; the people were well-disposed and always ready to welcome the King’s representative as he was driven through the heart of the Indian quarters. But as the anarchical and revolutionary movement spread and attempts were made upon the lives even of Viceroys, the old route through the city was, except for very special reasons, gradually abandoned, and the incoming and departing potentates were escorted along the safer route of Queen’s road. The distance of this thoroughfare from the heart of the City, and the growing nonchalance of the majority of the inhabitants in regard to Viceregal appearances in public, were naturally responsible for an absence of sight-seers on the processional route, and at times there were few persons to be seen except the foot-police lining the sides of the road. On the occasion of Lord Chelmsford’s arrival in April, 1916, one of the Superintendents, through whose division a portion of the route passed, determined to keep up appearances of loyal welcome, by collecting the necessary crowd at Sandhurst Bridge and instructing them beforehand in the art of hand-clapping and other manifestations of popular satisfaction. As it was obviously impossible to impress respectable householders and others for this duty, the sectional officers were instructed to shepherd their bad characters of both sexes to the fixed point, after arranging that they all donned clean clothes and were paid 2 annas apiece for their trouble. The plan worked well. As the new Viceroy’s carriage swept out of Queen’s road on to the bridge, the signal was given and a hearty burst of hand-clapping, punctured with cries of shabash, rose from the little crowd of disreputables at the corner. No one knew who they were, except the police who had hunted them out of their haunts a few hours previously: and the Viceroy was doubtless gratified at this signal expression of welcome. When the last of the escort had passed, the unfortunates were taken back to their quarter and there set free to resume their ordinary and less harmless avocations.
There was no need of artificial welcomes of this character when Their Majesties visited Bombay in 1911, or at their final departure in 1912. They drove through the heart of the City; and both in the wide thoroughfares of the European business-quarter and in the narrower streets of the Indian city they were affectionately greeted and welcomed by thousands of their subjects of all castes and creeds. Their progress was, indeed, a triumph. The choice of the route had not been settled without some doubt and misgiving. The authorities in England declared that the royal procession must not pass along any road of less than a certain width: the Commissioner of Police pointed out that this restriction would entirely debar Their Majesties from entering the City north of Carnac road. The restriction was therefore waived, on condition that the Police adopted all possible measures to render the route completely secure. This by no means easy task was achieved by the C. I. D. and the divisional police, of whom the former spent the three months preceding the Royal Visit in mapping out the houses on the route, making themselves acquainted with all the inmates, posting plain-clothes men and agents in the upper-storeys, and keeping a daily register of arrivals and departures. In one or two cases the divisional police, whose duties lay in holding the route and directing traffic, imposed even stricter conditions than the C. I. D., as the following incident proves. Three or four days before Their Majesties’ arrival, an elderly Muhammadan woman of the lower class visited the Head Police Office and asked for an interview with the Commissioner. Her request was granted; and on being shown in, she informed the Commissioner that she occupied a room in the upper-storey of a house near the junction of Sandhurst and Parel roads, and that she desired permission to look out of her window at the royal procession. “But,” said the Commissioner, “you need no permission for that.” “Yes, Huzur, I do”, she answered; “the section-wala (i.e. the officer in charge of a police-station) says that unless I obtain a permit I must keep my window shut on the day”. It was clearly useless to argue with the old lady, who was honestly bent upon obtaining darshan of the Padshah. The Commissioner, therefore, wrote out the following pass in his own hand, signed it, and sent her away satisfied:—
“To all Police Officers and those whom it may concern.
This is to certify that Aminabai, living in House No. —— ———— street, second floor, is hereby granted permission to look out of her own window at His Majesty the King-Emperor, on the occasion of the Royal Progress through Bombay on December 2nd. 1911.
S. M. Edwardes,
Commissioner of Police.”
As an additional precaution the Commissioner of Police asked the Bombay Government to invest him with special magisterial powers, which would enable him to deal summarily with persons of bad character, whose liberty it might be necessary to curtail during the period of the Royal Visit. The request having been granted, the Commissioner proceeded to remand to jail the majority of the well-known hooligans and bad characters, to the number of 400. Fully another three hundred persons with guilty consciences decided to leave Bombay for a holiday up-country, in the belief that they would be sent to jail if they stayed in the City. In this way the City was cleared of seven or eight hundred of its worst characters, and the daily crime returns subsequently proved that the action thus taken produced a very marked diminution of crime during the period of the Royal Visit. Moreover, respectable townspeople, learning of the incarceration of the criminal classes, were able to leave their houses freely at night to visit the illuminations, without fear of burglaries occurring in their absence or of having their pockets picked in the crowd. Political offenders, who usually belonged to a higher stratum of society, were treated differently. In one or two cases they were remanded to jail for treatment as first-class misdemeanants: but the majority were given the option of spending a fortnight in some place chosen by themselves, the police of that place being warned of their arrival and of the need of keeping them under surveillance. In one instance a détenu asked to be allowed to visit Ceylon, which he had never seen, and he was accordingly sent there in company with a plain-clothes officer of the C. I. D., who duly escorted him back again at the end of fifteen days. The entire absence of any protest on the part of the public or the Indian press against the Commissioner’s action shows that the powers were wielded cautiously and that special measures of this kind were generally accepted as appropriate to the occasion. The wholesale disappearance for the time being of the criminal and hooligan element certainly contributed to the peaceful and orderly progress of the Visit, and produced an immediate and marked decline of crime, which enabled the police to concentrate all their attention on the special arrangements for the functions held during Their Majesties’ stay.
Both before and during the Royal Visit, the Police received much help from the public. There was scarcely a householder who did not willingly undertake to carry out the suggestions of the police, and a large number of people, drawn from various classes and communities, volunteered to serve as special constables during the Visit. As to the manner in which the police force itself performed its heavy work, it will suffice to quote the words of the Governor-in-Council, who was “commanded to express to the Police of the City of Bombay His Imperial Majesty’s ‘entire satisfaction with the admirable police arrangements made during His Imperial Majesty’s recent visit to Bombay and with the manner in which they were carried out’”. In recognition of the exemplary performance of heavy additional duties, all ranks of the force, from inspectors downwards, received a special bonus, equivalent to ten days’ pay. Four Superintendents and three Inspectors received the medal of the Royal Victorian Order from the King-Emperor himself.
The subject of cotton-fires at the Colaba Green was revived by the disastrous epidemic of fires in the cold weather of 1913-14. As previously mentioned, a special committee was appointed by Government, with the Commissioner of Police as chairman, to enquire into the origin of the fires and suggest precautions for the future. The report of this committee, which found that the weight of evidence pointed to wholesale incendiarism, was submitted only a few weeks before the outbreak of War in 1914, and consequently received early burial in the records of the Secretariat. The deductions of the Committee were strengthened to some extent by the inquiries carried out by the C. I. D. during 1914. A thorough examination of the books of various companies established beyond a shadow of doubt that large fortunes had been made over the fires by persons in the cotton trade, as a result of fraudulent dealing, mixing and classification of cotton. This system of dishonesty had been facilitated by slack methods of insurance, which in turn were rendered profitable by clever underwriting. It is doubtful whether these little ‘idiosyncrasies’ of the Bombay cotton market will ever be wholly eradicated.