Page:Forty Thousand Followers of Gandhi in Prison.djvu/10

 they were first soundly beaten and then dragged by the legs with their shoulder and head trailing along the ground until the hair was rubbed off and in one case at least an unmentionable but revolting cruelty practised, recalls some of the horrors perpetrated by the police officials in Martial Law days in Amristar.

Religion not respected.

What is worse still, the police seem to take a delight in offending the religious susceptibilities of the people they arrest; sometimes a Koran or a Bhagawadgita is beaten with a shoe, sometimes a Sikh is pulled by his beard (as was brazenly admitted by European police officer in the court of Mr. Keough the other day;) and sometimes the Sikhs are tied together by the hair of the head. It is to be remembered that all this time the people arrested are entirely non-violent and unresisting and make not the slightest objection to go along with the police officers. Only the other day, on the 18th of April, when a party of young men in Lahore were taking some of the old discarded foreign clothes, about 1000 in number, in procession, the police surrounded them, belaboured them with sticks and snatched away all the clothes that were carried in procession.

Women annoyed.

They did not even respect the modesty of women in Subraon, a village in the Lahore District. The president of the Sikh League has made a definite charge that the police entered the Zenana portions of the houses and made the women give up their jewelry, and sometimes even snatched them from their persons. It is worthy of note that in this affair, the magistrate, who came to the village had no distraint warrants with him and yet forcibly took away the cattle, fodder and ornaments from the people’s houses, who had to pay the punitive tax.