Rowlatt Acts.
On February 1919, legislation was passed by the
government of India over the unanimous opposition of all nonofficial Indians of
the Imperial Legislative Council. They allowed certain political cases to be
tried without juries and internment of suspects without trial. Their object was
to replace the repressive provisions of the wartime Defense of India Act (1915)
by a permanent law. They were based on the report of Justice S.A.T. Rowlatt's
committee of 1918.The Rowlatt Acts were much resented by an aroused Indian
public. Mahatma Gandhi organized a protest movement that led directly to the
Amritsar massacre on April 1919 and to his Noncooperation movement (1920-22).
The acts were never actually used.
The issue that served to rally millions of Indians,
arousing them to a new level of disaffection from British rule, was the
government of India's hasty passage of the Rowlatt Acts early in 1919. These
"black acts," as they came to be called, were peacetime extensions of
the wartime emergency measures passed in 1915 and had been rammed through the Supreme
Legislative Council over the unanimous opposition of its Indian members,
several of whom, including Jinnah, resigned in protest. Jinnah wrote to Viceroy
Lord Chelmsford that the enactment of such autocratic legislation, following
the victorious conclusion of a war in which India had so loyally supported
Britain, was an unwarranted uprooting of the "fundamental principles of
justice" and a gross violation of the "constitutional rights of the
people."
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