THE ENQUIRY COMMITTEE

IT will have been seen from the report published in these columns yesterday and the day before that the first two sittings of the Disorders Enquiry Committee at Lahore were practically occupied with a searching examination, both by the President and the members of the Committee, of Mr. Miles Irving, who was Deputy Commissioner at Amritsar during the disturbances in April. Mr. Irving is one of the most important witnesses that are likely to appear before the Committee, and his evidence threw a good deal of light on certain points that had hitherto been left more or less obscure. What everybody must have felt, however, while the evidence was going on, and what those who read the report of the proceedings in cold print will feel all the more keenly, is that the evidence would have been both much fuller and more valuable if the examination of the witness by Lord Hunter and his colleagues had been supplemented by cross-examination by one of those gentlemen who have made a special study of the case from the people’s point of view: and this feeling must be fully shared by both the Government and the Committee. After all, the President and the members of the Committee, with all their desire and even determination to do the best they can, have not that complete knowledge of the facts of the case which only a patient study extending over weeks could give, and in the absence of this knowledge the questions put by them are bound to leave at least a substantial part of the ground that would otherwise have been covered by evidence more or less unoccupied. This, coupled with the fact that on the non- official side there will be no representative evidence worth the name, must give the Government and the Committee, no less than the public, furiously to think as to the possible outcome of the enquiry.