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6
LEAGUE ASSAULTS ON SATYARTGA PHAKASH
Government's support to ban it and seize its copies. It banned
it twice, and twice it did so behind the back of those who
regard it as a sacred book ever since it was first published in
1875. The first time it delivered an assault upon the Hindus
by banning that book was in 1944. It did so then under
the Defence of India Rules, a temporary war-time measure,
intended purely to serve the purpose and the interests of
the war. No man of personal integrity or moral worth would
have consented to be party to this kind of nefarious prosti-
tution of law, and authority for the purpose of so openly
and deliberately condemning a sacred book of other people and
to humiliate them in the eye of the world.
And the League leadership did so without cause, without
provocation. It continued the ban for a little less than two
years, as long as the Defence of India Rules lasted. Some
credulous Hindus were inclined to credit the Sind League
Ministry with some measure of honesty of purpose. The
Leaguers created the false impression by this surreptitious
use of the Rules, and so these Hindus persuaded themselves
to think, that the mere fact that the Government banned the
book under the temporary war-time measure showed that
the Sind Ministry, whether rightly or wrongly, in view of
the peculiar conditions of war in that part of India, felt
the need for such ban and that therefore the ban would
automatically disappear for good with the disappearance of
the Rules. The Defence of India Rules did disappear in
time and so did with it terminate the ban on
Satyartha
Prakash.
But some days thereafter the ban has been
reimposed on that sacred book, thus holding the members of
a
sister community deliberately to open condemnation and
ridicule for a second time.