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The Trial of the Last Emperor

The Trial of the Last Emperor

 
Had Bahadur Shah Zafar been conversant with international law, he might have questioned the very legitimacy of the trial he was made to face.
The last Mughal was charged with sedition which means acting rebelliously or promoting rebellion against the government. But who constituted the government of India in 1857? Technically, Bahadur Shah himself. He was the Emperor of India, and though he had lost all power, he was the legal ruler of the country. The East India Company was only an agent of the Mughal emperor, that status having been given to it by Shah Alam in 1764. So how could the emperor be charged with sedition? Was he rebelling against his own government?
The Company could have abolished the title of Badshah as suggested by Lord Dalhousie but it chose not to. Bahadur Shah was past 80, and was ailing. The Company preferred to wait for the death of the emperor to remove the legal anomaly which recognized the Mughal emperor as a de jure ruler while the Company constituted the de facto government. 
Maulana Azad argues that even the so called mutiny could not be considered a mutiny as the sepoys did not revolt against the sovereign of the land i.e. Bahadur Shah; when the army denied the authority of the Company, it appealed to the Emperor to resume his sway.
However, these finer legal points were not raised before the commission constituted by the company to hold Bahadur Shah's trial. The emperor was not provided with legal assistance. He was too old and infirm to understand the implications of the trial at which he was pronounced guilty and exiled to Rangoon. Indian legal experts like B.R. Agarwala describe the trial of Bahadur Shah as a farce.

1857 in Cold Print

Newspapers in India wrote extensively on the happenings in 1857–59. Commenting on reports in a prominent pro-British paper, Sir George Trevelyan observed:
"...Every column teemed with invectives which at that time seemed coarse and tedious, but which we must now pronounce to be wicked and blasphemous. For what could be more audacious than to assert that Providence had granted us a right to destroy a nation in our wrath? — to slay and burn, and plunder, not in the cause of order and civilization, but in the name of our insatiable vengeance, and our imperial displeasure..."
Several Indian papers of Bombay (Mumbai) such as the Bombay Samachar, the Jam-e-Jamshed and the Rast Goftar defended their countrymen against the attack of British journalists. 
Three papers, Durbin, Sultan-ul-Akhbar, and Samachar Sudhavarshan were prosecuted for writing seditious articles. In Calcutta, Bengal Hurkaru was suspended for six days until its editor S.L. Blanchand resigned.
Harischandra Mukherji the editor of the Hindoo Patriot, presented a balanced view of the situation prevailing in the country. His writings clearly showed that there was no danger to the government and that there was no need to introduce the harsh measures against Indians advocated by some Englishmen.

The Reaction Abroad

In an article published on 31 July 1857 in the New York Daily Tribune, Karl Marx wrote, "By and by there will ooze out other facts able to convince even John Bull himself that what he considers a military mutiny is in truth a national revolt".
In the same newspaper on 8 May 1858 the social scientist, Friedrich Engels wrote on the excesses of the British army:
"…The fact is, there is no army in Europe or America with so much brutality as the British. Plundering, violence, massacre—things that everywhere else are strictly and completely banished—are a time-honoured privilege, a vested right of the British soldier….For twelve days and nights there was no British army at Lucknow—nothing but a lawless, drunken, brutal rabble, dissolved into bands of robbers far more lawless, violent and greedy than the sepoys who had just been driven out of the place. The sack of Lucknow in 
1858 will remain an 
everlasting disgrace to the British military service…"


Blood Thirst

When the sepoys rose in revolt in Meerut, they had but one thought in mind — to slaughter all the feringhees and this they did, sparing neither young nor old; male or female. These atrocities were repeated in Delhi, Jhansi, Kanpur and other places.
The British hit back with a vengeance. General Neill, in his March from Calcutta to Varanasi instructed his men to destroy all places en route. "On they marched for three days," writes Kaye," leaving everywhere behind them as they went, traces of retributory power of the English in desolated villages and corpses dangling from the branches of trees." In Allahabad, "for three months eight dead–carts daily went their rounds from sunrise to sunset to take down the corpses which hung at the crossroads and market places." 
Reporting on the atrocities committed in Delhi, the Bombay correspondent of the Times, London, wrote: "No such scene has been witnessed in the city of Shah Jahan since the day that Nadir Shah…directed the massacre of its inhabitants." Kaye agrees: "Many who had never struck a blow against us … were pierced by our bayonets…"
"The system of burning villages," writes Holms, "was in many instances fearfully abused. Old men who had done us no harm and helpless women, with sucking infants at their breasts, felt the weight of our vengeance, no less than the vilest malefactors; and as they wandered from their blazing huts they must have cursed us as bitterly as we cursed the murderers of Kanpur."
The atrocities seen in 1857, writes R.C. Majumdar, "prove, if proof were needed, that the much-vaunted culture of the progressive world is only skin-deep, — whether the skin is black or white, belongs to the spiritual east or materialistic west, to the civilized Europe or backward Asia... Mankind would do well to ponder over this __ that only a very thin line demarcates the human being from an animal."

Id Mubarak

The battle for Delhi had reached a crucial stage in August 1847. Id was around the corner and among those looking forward eagerly to the festival were the British! A British officer Keith Young wrote to his wife:
"Some of the Mahomedan fanatics, we are told, have declared their fixed intention of killing cows... on that day... It is hoped that they will religiously adhere to their determination and there is then sure to be a row between the Mahomedans and Hindoos."
On the day of the Id, Emperor Bahadur Shah sacrificed a sheep at the Idgah. The morning was spent in prayer. The emperor held a ceremonial durbar at which he received presents and distributed robes of honour.
Keith Young wrote to his wife next day: "Our hopes of a grand row in the city yesterday at the Id festival have not... been fulfilled... The king had issued strict orders against the killing of cows... in the city... and this... must have satisfied the Hindoos; and instead of fighting among themselves they all joined together to make a vigorous attack to destroy us and utterly sweep us from the face of the earth."

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