puted all kinds of enormities. A
great popular demonstration against him had been organised for March 5,
and some 150 Sikhs had gone out to make arrangements for sheltering and
feeding several thousands in the immediate vicinity of the shrine. The
Mahunt had already scented danger and he clearly believed in taking the
offensive. He collected some fifty Pathan cut-throats as a Praetorian
guard for the temple, and also, for a purpose which was soon to
transpire, a very large store of petrol. When the advance party of
reformers entered the shrine to perform their morning devotions the
gates were closed upon them and over 100 were butchered, and their
corpses so effectively soaked in oil and burned that when the District
Commissioner and a detachment of troops arrived post-haste on the scene,
the victims could scarcely be counted except by the number of charred
skulls.

There was a universal thrill of horror and fury, and passions rose so
high that Government found itself suddenly confronted with a situation
which at once put to a severe test the capacity of the new regime to
deal with emergencies endangering law and order. That Indian Ministers
now shared in the responsibility of government, and that there was a
popular assembly to undertake legislation for composing the differences
between the conflicting sections of the Sikh community, helped at least
as much to avert still graver troubles as the object-lesson which the
Nankhanda Saheb tragedy afforded to thoughtful Punjabees of all creeds.
The massacre carried out by a mere handful of Pathans was a grim
reminder of the dangers to which the Punjab would be the first to be
exposed if the hasty severance of the British connection for which Mr.
Gandhi is clamouring were to leave it defenceless against the flood of
lawless savagery that would at once pour down, as so often before in
Indian history, from the wild fastnesses of the North-West Frontier.

CHAPTER XI

CROSS CURRENTS IN SOUTHERN INDIA

The elections in the Southern Provinces presented a somewhat different
picture though the defeat of "Non-co-operation" was equally complete.
The Nerbudda river has been from times immemorial a great dividing line,
climatic, racial, and often political, between Northern and Southern
India. It still is so. For, whilst with a few relatively unimportant
exceptions the whole of British India--save Burma, which, except from an
administrative point of view, is not India at all-