Martial Law Tribunals and the Theory of a Rebellion

WE have in our leading article examined the question whether the outbreak of April, 1919 amounted to a rebellion, and have shown that the view of the minority, that there was a rebellion, though there were riots deserving the severest condemnation, is the only proper view to take on the evidence produced before the Committee, imperfect as that evidence clearly was. That the Government of India would not accept this view and would readily accept the view of the majority was, of course, only to be expected. In their own words, they could not take a detached view of this matter, because equally with the Punjab Government they had proceeded on the assumption that there was a rebellion. What we did not expect was that they would seek to support this by referring to the finding of the Martial Law Tribunals. “We desire to observe,” they write, “that the opinion of the minority regarding the nature of the disorders is discounted by their findings of fact, while the conclusion of the majority that a movement which started in rioting became a rebellion is supported by the conviction before various tribunals of a large number of persons for the offence of waging war against the King.” The Punjab Government and Government of India have themselves helped to show how injustice was perpetrated in the name of justice by substantially reducing all the more important sentences. To quote from the majority report, of the sentences of transportation for life, 2 only were maintained, in 5 the Government ordered immediate release of the convicts, while the remaining 253 sentences were commuted to terms of imprisonment, varying from one to ten years: which is not accurate, because in at least one case, a sentence of transportation was reduced to imprisonment for three months. This does not show that the Government takes exactly the view of the offences of the accused persons that the Commissions did.