An amazing defeat

THE rejection by the Legislative Assembly of Amarnath Dutt’s Bill for the repeal of the Bengal Regulation is perhaps the heaviest, most regrettable and most amazing defeat which the non-official benches generally and the Swarajists in particular have so far sustained. If there is one law statute book which is more lawless than any other and has been condemned by all that is good and true in the land for a whole generation, the law is the Bengal Regulation. It is generally believed that Lala Lajpat Rai was the first Indian in our time to be deported under the Regulation, and that it was the use of the Regulation in his case that first roused the conscience and judgment of the country to the danger involved in its existence. That is not so. Nearly a decade before Rai was deported, the Regulation had been used in another case, and no less a person than Babu Surendranath Banerjee, whose authority was wrongly quoted by a European member in the recent debate in support of the retention of the Regulation, had then condemned it in terms of unsparing severity. “What becomes of the vaunted boast of the rights of British subjects”, he said, “if at any moment behind our back, without a word of explanation, without any justification of any kind, we may be arrested, our properties may be confiscated under the operation of an old and obsolete law? We must agitate, ceaselessly agitate, until this absurd Regulation is wiped off the Statute Book.” Since these words were uttered, India has carried on a ceaseless agitation against the Regulation, but the only response which the Government has made to this universal demand is that the obsolete law had ceased to be obsolete.