Word: brailsford
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Dates: during 1931-1931
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Carefully Briton Brailsford described the system of parallel government in Bombay, whereby members of the Indian National Congress themselves marshal and police their demonstrations. He reported that the Gandhiwomen who picket shops selling British goods, and who fling themselves down to be trodden on by any Indian determined to enter, will stand aside for occidental shoppers. "The shopkeepers themselves signed a requisition to the effect that they made no complaint against this peaceful picketing, and for a time there were few arrests...
...around Bombay, Ahmedabad, Delhi and Benares, Mr. Brailsford examined many Indian men and women bearing "wounds on teh feets or bruises on the stomach, made with the butt end of a rifle . . . one man with a terribly swollen arm, fractured or dislocated, hanging in a sling . . . a woman [with] a badly swollen face caused by a blow...
...opinion of Briton Brailsford, "cold English brains" devised the system whereby bands of native police, especially in the rural districts, set upon individual Indian men & women and beat them. "The execution [of this plan] was left to hotter heads and rougher hands," notably to Mohuntal Shah, chief Indian official of the Borsad Taluka in Kaira District, who, Mr. Brailsford reports, has not only presided at numerous pouncings and beatings, but also "occasionally assisted with a heavy walking stick...
Individual beatings are applied, in the main, to extort from the victim his land tax. Mr. Brailsford traveled through district after district where the peasants had taken and kept this vow: "We will pay no taxes until Gandhi is released from jail...
Gandhi, for Jailbird Gandhi not thou- sands but millions of individual Indians are taking individual beatings which they could, escape by paying what His Majesty's Government call, quite accurately, "nor-mal taxes." Physical extortion, even of taxes, is in law virtually everywhere a crime. Briton Brailsford reports that the Indian agents of the British Government have pursued tax evaders out of British India into the native State of Baroda and beaten them there. This is a crime for which the Man of the Year in Yerovila Jail at Poona is to blame. He is to blame because, although...