Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 18th of March 1919, a law passed in Delhi that would shake the foundations of British rule in India. The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919 was rushed through the Imperial Legislative Council over the united objection of every single Indian member present. Its popular name came from Sir Sidney Rowlatt, the judge who chaired the committee that recommended it. The Indian members who opposed it called it something else entirely: the Black Act.

  What powers did this law actually grant? What happened when the people pushed back? And why did one man's quiet, steel-edged voice cut through the shouting of the multitude in a way that no one had heard before?

• 2. A Law Built on Wartime Powers

  ›

  The Defence of India Act, 1915 had given the colonial government sweeping emergency powers during the First World War, including preventive indefinite detention and imprisonment without trial. When that war ended, those powers were set to lapse. The colonial government feared that revolutionary nationalists might revive the kinds of conspiracies that had troubled it during the conflict. The Rowlatt Committee was convened specifically to recommend how those emergency powers could be made permanent.

  Two bills were introduced in the Central Legislature on the 6th of February 1919. They became known to critics simply as the Black Bills. Despite sustained opposition, one became law six weeks later.

  The resulting act let the colonial authorities imprison any person suspected of terrorism for up to two years without trial. Police gained the power to arrest any Indian on the basis of mere suspicion alone, without requiring a warrant. Press controls were tightened, and in-camera trials could proceed without juries. The accused had no right to know who had accused them or what evidence had been gathered against them. A panel of three high court judges heard the cases, and their decisions were final, with no higher court available for appeal. Habeas corpus was suspended. Those who were convicted and then released had to deposit securities and were barred from political, educational, or religious activities.

• 3. Resignations and Outrage

  ›

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah, then a member of the All-India Muslim League, resigned from the Imperial Legislative Council in protest. His resignation letter was addressed directly to Frederic Thesiger, the Viceroy of India, and in it he named the act a Black Act. Madan Mohan Malaviya and Mazarul Haque resigned alongside him.

  Mahatma Gandhi argued that it was wrong to punish the entire population in response to isolated political crimes. He and others concluded that working through constitutional channels was futile. Gandhi called upon the people to practice Satyagraha, a form of nonviolent civil resistance, against the law.

  On the 6th of April, a hartal took place across the country. Indians suspended their businesses, went on strike, fasted, prayed, and held public meetings against the Black Act. Gandhi bathed in the sea at Mumbai and gave a speech before a procession made its way to Madhav Baug temple. One of the largest protests occurred in Ambala, Punjab Province, in early 1919, under the chairmanship of a lawyer named Jhanda Singh Giani.

  The hartal in Delhi on the 30th of March succeeded but was overshadowed by violent tensions that broke into rioting in Punjab, Delhi, and Gujarat. Deciding that the conditions for nonviolent resistance were not yet in place, Gandhi suspended the movement.

• 4. The Voice With Steel in It

  ›

  Jawaharlal Nehru later described Gandhi's entry into the Rowlatt Bill protests in his book Glimpses of World History. He wrote that Gandhi had been very ill in early 1919 and had barely recovered when the agitation began. Nehru's account captures what set Gandhi apart from the politicians already in the streets.

  Nehru wrote that Gandhi's voice was quiet and low, yet could be heard above the shouting of the multitude. It was soft and gentle, yet seemed to carry steel hidden away somewhere in it. Every word used was full of meaning and carried a deadly earnestness. Behind the language of peace and friendship there was power, a quivering shadow of action, and a determination not to submit to a wrong.

  Nehru contrasted this with what he called the daily politics of condemnation, the long speeches always ending in futile resolutions of protest that nobody took seriously. The Rowlatt Act agitation, in Nehru's reading, was where the politics of action replaced the politics of talk.

  Historians have identified this moment as the one that brought Gandhi to the mainstream of the Indian independence struggle and opened what came to be called the Gandhian Era of Indian politics.

• 5. Punjab, Baisakhi, and Jallianwala Bagh

  ›

  The Rowlatt Act came into effect on the 21st of March 1919. In Punjab, resistance ran particularly deep. On the 10th of April, two congress leaders, Dr. Satyapal and Saifuddin Kitchlew, were arrested and removed secretly to Dharamsala.

  Three days later, on the 13th of April, people from villages across the region gathered in Amritsar. They had come for Baisakhi Day celebrations, and many came also to protest the deportation of the two leaders. The army was called in. What followed was the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, one of the defining atrocities of British rule in India.

  The path from the hurried passage of a preventive detention law in Delhi to the killings at Jallianwala Bagh ran through six weeks of rising protest, suppression, and escalation. The law that its authors described as a measure against revolutionaries had produced the very crisis its passage was meant to prevent.

• 6. Repeal

  ›

  The British colonial government ultimately accepted the findings of the Repressive Laws Committee and repealed the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919 in March 1922. It was not repealed alone. A wide sweep of laws went with it, including the Indian Press Act of 1910, Regulation III of 1818, the Sedition laws encoded in Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, the Criminal Law Amendment Acts of 1908 and 1913, the Criminal Tribes Act, and the Defence of India Act of 1915, among many others.

  The repeal came roughly three years after the act's passage. By then, the political landscape of India had been transformed. The Gandhian era that the Rowlatt Act had helped ignite was well underway, and the Non-cooperation movement that began partly in response to the law had drawn millions of Indians into active resistance for the first time. The man who had barely recovered from illness when the bills were introduced in February 1919 was now the central figure in the independence struggle.