Page:The Life of Lokamanya Tilak.djvu/184

 and most inglorious thing ; they reported to the All- India Congress Committee their inability to hold the Sessions of the Congress at Nagpur. A meeting of the All-India Congress Committee was held at Bombay on November loth, and there, in spite of the protests of Messrs. Tilak and Khaparde, in spite of the willingness of the Nagpur Nationalists to accept any compromise for the sake of the reputation of their City and Province, the venue of the Congress was changed to Surat, one of the strongholds of the Moderates.

Alerady the people were in an angry mood. Repres- sion was at work in several part of India. Bombay was comparatively quiet. Far in the South, Rajmahendri, Cocoanada were seething with discontent. More important still were the events in the Punjab, where the mistaken and short-sighted policy of the Bureaucracy in trying to pass into Acts two Bills — the Colonisation Bill and the Land Alienation Act Amendment Bill — - endangered the rights of the people over their lands and made the discontent acute. The abnormal increase of Land Revenue in the Rawalpindi District, the in- crease of the Canal rates on the Bari-Doab Canal, touched the pockets of even the poorest cultivators and thus created a grave situation. The Editor and the Proprietor of the Punjabee were prosecuted and in May 1907 Lala Rajpat Rai and Sirdar Ajit Singh were deported. This deportation created a storm of indignation and convinced the country of its helplessness in defending its birth-rights. In Bengal, the Editor of Yugantar was sent to goil. The Editor of the Sandhya refused to conduct his defence because " he did not think that in carrying on the God-appointed