ABSTRACT
After the non-cooperation movement showed the Congress to be adept at turning the mechanisms of the justice system to their advantage, there were several distinct moves away from the formal legal system in the early 1930s. This chapter and the next one focus on the ways in which provincial governments in India sought to avoid using ordinary courts and prisons first when confronting non-violent protesters and then when searching for measures to end communal rioting. During the civil disobedience movement, local-level state forces developed new approaches in an effort to prevent Indians from participating in anti-colonial activities. This chapter examines two of the many alternatives to imprisonment used during this period. One of the most prominent methods adopted was to physically remove satyagrahis from the scene of protests, using force if necessary, but formally arresting as few as possible. As a result, the number and the severity of physical clashes which took place between police and protesters rose dramatically during the movement. These conflicts were transformed into a form of political drama as various political organisations used non-official enquiries into local level confrontations to try to further their own agendas. The Congress high command was unable to ensure that all nationalist groups shared the same message, however. The first section argues, therefore, that the task of interpreting state violence may have been as likely to divide Indians as to unite them. As non-official enquiry committees proliferated, governments in India became increasingly reluctant to investigate, let alone to discipline, members of the police and bureaucracy for misconduct in their encounters with the population. The second purpose of this chapter is to analyse the programme developed by the Education Department in the United Provinces which endeavoured to use schools to penalise students and teachers for their participation in the civil disobedience movement. The plans were disrupted, however, by a combination of intra-governmental disobedience and popular resistance. These two very different types of contest brought individual state agents and civil intermediaries into the domain of confrontational politics, where their actions were drawn into larger partisan struggles.
