A terrible indictment

THE passing by a substantial majority of the Legislative Assembly of Mr TC Goswami’s motion for adjournment of the House to discuss the situation created by the hunger strike among the Regulation and Ordinance prisoners in Mandalay Jail is of importance, not merely in itself, but because of the grave indictment drawn up against a department of the administration in the course of it, and to which the government was not able to give a satisfactory reply. And the most remarkable part of the thing is that this indictment was based not upon the evidence of those who were directly or indirectly affected by the administration of the department, but of one who had himself been connected with the administration, and had found its methods so cruel and inhuman that he took an early opportunity of entering a strong and unequivocal protest against them. We refer, of course, to the evidence of Col Mulvany before the Jail Committee, from which Mr Goswami read extracts in the course of his speech in support of his motion. The Colonel stated that not only was the solitary confinement to which State prisoners were subjected positively inhuman, but that misleading reports were deliberately submitted to the government. “I feel very strongly on the point,” he said, “and I write under great restraint. I consider that the share I was compelled to accept in the painful business was and is a disgrace which can never be obliterated and I cannot say any less than that my feelings were outraged by the cruelty of treatment I was ordered and expected to carry out.”