26 Stands Fast

From his bench in New Delhi last week India's Chief Justice Sir Maurice Linford Gwyer handed down a bombshell decision: Mohandas K. Gandhi, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and 8,000 other Congress party leaders were being illegally detained by the Viceroy's Government. Reason: Rule No. 26, of the Defence of India Act, under which the Congress leaders were arrested and have been held without trial since last August, was invalid because "it went beyond the powers which the Legislature thought fit to confer on the Central Government."

Crux of Chief Justice Gwyer's decision was that numbers of prisoners in India may have been arrested on the slimmest of evidence. He ruled: "There is no power to detain a person because the Government thinks that he may do something hereafter or because it thinks that he is a man likely to do it; there must be suspicions based on reasonable grounds that he is actually about to do it."

Chief Justice Gwyer's decision made the behavior of the British Raj in the past nine months look not quite Marquess of Queensberry. But it brought no change in the status of the arrested Congress leaders.

The India Office in London plunked the fizzing bombshell in a pail of water, announced that the law will be revised to fit the punishment.

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