ABSTRACT
Not long ago the appellate bench of the Allahabad High Court gave its decision in a case in which an Indian had been convicted under section 109 of the Railway Act for having willfully entered a third class compartment reserved for Europeans and Anglo-Indians and refusing to leave it when asked to do so. The defence of the appellant was that he was within his rights to enter the compartment as the Railway Act did not empower the authorities to reserve a compartment for a particular class of passengers. Their Lordships however upheld the conviction maintaining that it was merely a case of providing for the general convenience of the travelling public and that such a reservation was therefore legitimate and did not involve racial preference. They however observed that if any citizen of the country found anything objectionable in the rule, his remedy lay through the authority of the Governor-General-in-Council and he had certainly not been left to work out the remedy himself by a deliberate breach of the rule.
