Had the measures taken, however stern, been confined to the repression of actual violence and to the punishment of the guilty, the reaction produced amongst the great majority of Indians by the atrocities which Indian mobs had committed, and the appalling spirit of lawlessness which inspired them, would probably have been at least as great as the impression which they at first made upon Mr. Gandhi himself, who suddenly recognised and admitted that he had underrated the “forces of evil” and advised his disciples to co-operate, as he himself had done at Ahmedabad, with Government in the restoration of order.  The Satyagraha Committee, of which he was President, resolved to suspend temporarily “civil 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.