ivil disobedience" to the laws, and the fraternisation between
Mahomedans and Hindus cooled down, when important Mahomedan associations
began to protest against the desecration of mosques by the admission of
Hindu "idolaters" to deliver fiery orations to mixed congregations
within the sacred precincts. But before the reaction could take real
effect, it was arrested by rumours of terrible happenings in the course
of the repression in the Punjab which turned the tide of Indian feeling
into an opposite direction, and for those rumours there ultimately
proved to have been no slight foundation.

The methods adopted in the Punjab had been very different from those
adopted in the Bombay Presidency, where there had been scarcely less
menacing outbursts in some of the northern districts, besides serious
rioting in Bombay itself. In Ahmedabad, the second city of the
Presidency, mob law reigned for two days. There were arson and pillage,
and murder of Europeans and Government officers. Troops had to be
hurried up to quell the disturbances, and for a short time the military
authorities had to take charge. The repression was stern; 28 of the
rioters were killed and 123 wounded in Ahmedabad alone. There were many
arrests and prosecutions. But those stormy days left no bitterness
behind them. The use of military force was not resented, because it was
directed only against the crowds actually engaged in violent rioting.
Martial law was never proclaimed, nor did the military authorities
prolong the exercise of their punitive powers beyond the short period of
active disorder, nor strain it beyond the measures essential to the
suppression of disorder. They never interfered in administrative
matters. The Bombay Government kept their heads, and there was nowhere
any wholesale surrender of the civil authority into military hands. Mr.
Gandhi, who had been turned back by the Punjab Government when he tried
to enter the Punjab, was left free by the Bombay Government, and the
value of his assistance in restoring order in Allahabad, whilst he was
in his first fit of penitence, was acknowledged by the authorities.

Very different was the intensive enforcement of martial law in the
Punjab. Even when all allowance is made for the more dangerous situation
created by a more martial population and the proximity of an always
turbulent North-Western Frontier with the added menace at that time of
an Afghan invasion, nothing can justify what was done at Am