MCQ
Q.
Which of the following was the main objective behind introducing the Rowlatt Act?
Correct Answer: A
Important Points
The correct answer is To curb the growing nationalist upsurge in the country.
Important PointsThe Rowlatt Act:
- The Government of India was ready with repression during and even after the First World War.
- Throughout the war, repression of nationalists had continued.
- The revolutionaries had been hunted down, hanged, and imprisoned.
- Many other nationalists such as Abul Kalam Azad had also been kept behind bars.
- The Government then decided to arm itself with more far-reaching powers, which went against the accepted principles of rule of law, to be able to suppress those nationalists who would refuse to be satisfied with the official reforms.
- For this reason, in March 1919, the Government passed the Rowlatt Act even though every single Indian member of the Central Legislative Council opposed it.
- Three of them, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Mazhar-ul-Huq resigned from their membership of the Council.
- This Act authorized the Government to imprison any person without trial and conviction in a court of law.
- The Act would thus also enable the Government to suspend the right of Habeas Corpus which had been the foundation of civil liberties in Britain.
Additional Information
- Just six months before the Montford Reforms were to be put into effect, two bills were introduced in the Imperial Legislative Council.
- One of them was dropped, but the other, an extension to the Defence of India Regulations Act 1915 was passed in March 1919.
- It was what was officially called the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, but popularly known as the Rowlatt Act.
- It was based on the recommendations made in the previous year to the Imperial Legislative Council by the Rowlatt Commission, headed by the British judge, Sir Sidney Rowlatt, to investigate the ‘seditious conspiracy’ of the Indian people. (The committee had recommended that activists should be deported or imprisoned without trial for two years and that even possession of seditious newspapers would be adequate evidence of guilt).
- The act allowed political activists to be tried without juries or even imprisoned without trial.
- It allowed the arrest of Indians without a warrant on the mere suspicion of ‘treason'.
- Such suspects could be tried in secrecy without recourse to legal help.
- A special cell consisting of three high court judges was to try such suspects and there was no court of appeal above that panel.
- This panel could even accept evidence not acceptable under the Indian Evidences Act.
- The law of habeas corpus, the basis of civil liberty, was sought to be suspended.
- The objective of the government was to replace the repressive provisions of the wartime Defence of India Act (1915) with a permanent law.
- So the wartime restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly were re-imposed in India.
- There was strict control over the press and the government was armed with a variety of powers to deal with anything the authorities chose to consider as terrorism or revolutionary tactics.
