The transcript of proceedings on the trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar II, titular king of Delhi, before a military commission, and upon a charge of rebellion, treason and murder comprises a surprisingly slim volume. Thinner than an average appeal paperbook filed before the Supreme Court of India.
Major FJ Harriott was Prosecutor for the Government. Reading his arguments, the first impression that one gets is that the prosecutor is not speaking to the Rule of Law. He articulates a ruler’s grievance at being challenged and invokes fear of instability and chaos. He also appropriates in the ruler’s name an entire religious identity and juxtaposes it with the faith of its opponents.
“I allude to […] the suddenness with which elements, have united themselves in a common crusade against a faith, which, as regards the inhabitants of this country whether Mahommedan or Hindu, was certainly a most unaggressive one.”
The prosecution case is not necessarily intended to comply with rules of evidence, or of showing the existence of a legal offence. The prosecutor is speaking to certain ideas – prejudices – that have already established themselves amidst the British public, and also amongst the colonial administrators. Even in Court, he is appealing to such prejudices alone.
The three tropes in the trial of Bahadur Shah: purity/pollution through food; conspiracies and foreign hands; and interminable investigations are very much in circulation in the political-legal sphere even today.
Harriott first speculatively demolishes the theory that the trigger for the events of May 10th 1857, the start of the uprising, had actually anything to do with the ‘greased cartridges’. He suggests that there must have been a dark (‘pre-planned’ as we like to call it now) conspiracy, but equally that the existence of such conspiracy may justifiably be presumed in the absence of any positive evidence.
“Although we may not possess positive evidence to the fact, yet it may fairly be presumed that [the evening when the mutiny broke out] was not the first occasion that these plotters of evil held their secret and sinister councils together”
Of the greased cartridges, Harriott argues that they were only a ruse for causing trouble. He believed that the Mahommedans didn’t care about pig’s fat and the Hindus always had the option to resign from the native infantry if the cartridges actually hurt their feelings.
“Who is there amongst us that does not almost daily witness these Mahommedans, in their capacity as table servants, carrying plates and dishes, which openly contain the very substance, which in reference to the cartridges, has been made the pretense of their offence. Even if we were to admit that all the cartridges were thoroughly saturated with pig’s and with cow’s fat, still what real valid objection on the score of their religion could the Mahommedan sepoys have had in using them?”
“When to this we add, what is well-known to everyone in India, whether Hindu, Mahommedan or European – that the native soldier has but to ask for his discharge, and that in times of peace, it is at once granted to him, without enquiry or difficulty of any kind – it seems beyond bounds of reasons to imagine that these men were drawn into acts of such revolting atrocity by any grievance either real or imagined.”
Harriott may well have been right in believing that the cartridges were not the only reason for native dissatisfaction and revolt. Any honest observer would have pointed him towards years of structural violence, economic abuse and social unrest.
The prosecutor, however, is no academic: he doesn’t involve himself in ‘delving deeper’ and in analysing the social discontent caused by unjust laws and colonial policies of exploitation. He doesn’t acknowledge, as a fair administrator might, that even during the uprising there had been monstrous violence from ‘both sides’. Three Mughal princes (the accused’s sons and grandson) were shot in a public spectacle by an officer with complete impunity.
Rather than examining the array of causes that might have led to widespread discontent, Harriott idly presumes the existence of an ‘evil conspiracy’ and conjures bogeymen, including the king who is on trial, and alleges that they manufactured grievances, and instigated the natives to revolt. (Somewhat like the narratives relating to the anti-CAA protests, I might add)
“Does it appear consistent with the natural order of events that such intense malignity should start into existence on one single provocation? Or can it be reconciled with the instincts, the traditions, or the idiosyncrasies of the Hindus, that they should, recklessly, without enquiry, and without thought, desire to imbrue their hands in human blood, casting aside the pecuniary and other advantages that bound them to the cause of order and of the Government?”
He speaks of the Mahommedan foreign hand and of the suggestible masses, thus also at once absolving the colonial state of actions that likely caused the dissent and rebellion.
“A Mahommedan priest, with pretended visions, and assumed miraculous powers – a Mahommedan King, his dupe and his accomplice – a Mahommedan clandestine embassy to the Mahommedan powers of Persia and Turkey resulting – Mahommedan prophecies as to the downfall of our power […] a Mahommedan press unscrupulously abetting – and Mahommedan sepoys initiating the mutiny.”
“They had not even the extenuation of a pretended grievance; yet they, at once, leagued themselves in rebellion against us, and induced the Hindus to join then, by speciously exciting them […]”
He speaks of all this admittedly without having any evidence permissible in law to make his case.
“I think gentlemen, even one must allow that if we had no other evidence of a plot, no testimony indicative of a previous conspiracy, the very nature of the outbreak itself must have convinced us of the existence of one.”
The prosecutor makes another argument, which has again recently become familiar: that lack of evidence does not mean that accused should be let off. No doubt the investigation will return something at the opportune moment.
Thus, as long as investigation is still going on, guilt must be ascribed upon the suspect and legal proceedings must continue. This has evidently become an acceptable position in court hearings in the present too.
The prosecutor concludes by speaking power to truth, and to the rule of law.
“I need not quote what may be the law of the land on such a point, for there is a yet higher law which must acquit him or condemn him, the law of conscience and of sense; that law which every one who hears me can apply […] It is a law that does not depend upon local constitutions, upon human institutes, or religious creeds; it is a law fixed in the heart of man by his Maker, and can it now here be set aside?”
Perhaps, the state’s commitment to rule of law is best gleaned from the way its prosecutors frame cases; how much social and political prejudice is used to damn an accused person. Similarly, the court’s fidelity shows in the space that it gives to such arguments.
As we all know, the colonial Court was persuaded by Major Harriott’s arguments and found “Bahadur Shah, ex-king of Delhi guilty of all and every part of the charges preferred against him”.
