Rowlatt Act passed over Indian opposition

Who: The Imperial Legislative Council in Delhi, which passed the law, and the Indian members who voted against it. Mohandas Gandhi, who answered it with his first all-India satyagraha. In Punjab, Dr Satyapal and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew, the Amritsar leaders of the protest.

What: The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, 1919, known as the Rowlatt Act after Sir Sidney Rowlatt, whose committee drafted it, kept wartime emergency restrictions in force in peacetime. Suspects could be jailed for up to two years without trial, and cases could be heard without a jury and without a right of appeal. A Lahore newspaper summed it up as "No Dalil, No Vakil, No Appeal." The draft appeared in the Gazette of India on 18 January 1919, the Council rushed it through between 6 February and 18 March, and every Indian member opposed it. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Mazhar-ul-Haq resigned from the Council in protest.

Gandhi called a hartal for 6 April 1919. Lahore came to a standstill, and cavalry fired on crowds there. In Amritsar the 6 April meeting and the Ram Navami procession of 9 April passed peacefully. On 10 April the authorities arrested Kitchlew and Satyapal and sent them to Dharamsala. A crowd of protesters was fired on near the railway bridge, with an official toll of 12 dead, and angry crowds then attacked banks and government buildings. On 11 April the city was handed to the army and Brigadier General Reginald Dyer declared all assemblies illegal.

Where: Delhi, for the vote. Lahore and Amritsar, in Punjab, for the protests that followed.

Why it mattered: The satyagraha against the Act was most intense in Punjab, and the arrests of 10 April led straight to the firing at Jallianwala Bagh on Baisakhi, 13 April. According to the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, a large share of the crowd were Sikhs who had come in from the surrounding villages for the festival. After the massacre the priests of Sri Darbar Sahib honoured Dyer, and the same source says this honouring sharpened Sikh demands to reform the management of their shrines, the Akali movement of 1920 to 1925. The Rowlatt Act itself was repealed in 1922.