I will mention the case of one of the men who has now been arrested and
is undergoing imprisonment as a first-class misdemeanant. He made at
least ten speeches up and down the country which our legal advisers
informed us were clearly actionable. I allude to Mr. Jawahir Lal Nebru.
His final effort was a speech, somewhere in the west of the Province, in
which he quoted word by word the sedition section, _i.e._, the promotion,
of disaffection against the Government as by law established and the
section which deals with promoting hatred between classes of His
Majesty's subjects, and he said that the object of his life was to carry
out this promotion of sedition and disaffection. Still we did nothing.
You may well ask why. We thought that the forces of reason and sobriety
would re-establish their sway. We hoped that the great body of moderate
opinion of the Provinces would be sufficiently powerful to assuage this
movement and to stop the dissemination of poison. We were wrong. So far
from losing any strength I do not hesitate to say that the movement has
gone on gaining strength. Then came the time in November when we were
confronted with reports from our trusted officers all over the provinces
which left no doubt whatever in our minds that the situation had very
greatly developed, and that there was imminent possibility (I would go
further and say probability) of an outburst of violence in more than one
district. I have here a big folio of reports. It is quite impossible for
me in debate like this to quote them all. There are copies of reports
from districts as wide apart and representative as Meerut, Cawnpur,
Fyzabad, Etawah, Balia, Barabanki and the peaceful district of Aligarh,
which, according to its member, Thakur Manak Singh, is now the scene of
this campaign of repression. I should like, as a typical instance, to
read out the description of the procedure which was adopted in the
Barabanki district. The Barabanki district, as my friend on my right
will bear me out, is a particularly difficult one. It is full of a class
whom religious fanaticism particularly affects and when it once gets out
of hand it is very difficult to deal with. I remember when I first came
to India, there was tremendous outbreak of dacoity and violent crime in
that and adjacent districts, which it took months to put down, at the
cost of immense suffering to the population. This is one of the
districts, which was selected as a focus in work on by these (what
should I call them?) advocates of soul force.