THE NECESSITY FOR A CHANGE 235
ment the Indian people had for some time been demanding a change in the form of the government. A Parliamentary form of government with a Parliamentary Executive was the goal they had laid before themselves.
The popular agitation for achieving this end assumed such proportions that, in the course of time, there was presented a serious issue for the consideration of the Executive in India. How was the government of the country to be carried on ? By force or by consent, Power seldom commits suicide of its own accord. Rather, when it fails to secure the willing compliance of the people, it resorts to force. That was the resource adopted by the Executive in India. Not satisfied with the aid of the power with which the Executive was endowed by the provisions of the Criminal and Penal Codes to anticipate offences by preventive acts, it besmeared the Indian Statute Book with a set of repressive laws hardly paralleled in any other part of the world. The Criminal Law Amendment Act XIV of 1908 empowered a magistrate with special sanction of the Government to hold an ex-parte inquiry without the presence of the accused or of his legal representative and commit him for trial to be conducted without a jury. Under another provision of the same Act the Executive could declare unlawful any association which in its view interfered with the maintenance of law and order. The State Prisoners Regulations [1] and Acts [2] authorizing the Executive to place under restraint any person whom it suspected but against whom it had no proof, constituted by themselves a perpetual suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act : [3] while under another Act [4 ] the Executive was empowered to proclaim “a State of Siege” or martial law in any area and suspend therein the jurisdiction of the civil courts in favour of the military courts. The Indian Press Act of 1910 put a complete muzzle on the Press. So wide were its provisions that in the opinion of a learned judge [5] of one of the Indian High Courts it was “difficult to see to what length its operation might not be plausibly extended by an ingenious mind”
1 Bengal Regulation III of 1818 ; Bombay Regulation XXV of 1827 ; Madras Regulation II of 1819.
2 Act XXIV of 1850 and Act III of 1858.
3 N. Ghose, Comparative Administrative Law, 1918, p. 480.
4 Act IX of 1857.
5 Sir Lawrence Jenkins, C. J., in re Mahomedali, I.L.R. 40, Cal. 466 (1913), quoted by N. Ghose, op. cit., p. 567.