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14 LEAGUE ASSAULTS ON SATYARTHA PEAKASN
in the matter of the weighing of evidence, the ascertainment,
examination and finding of all relevant facts, the construc-
tion of the language as well as the intelligent grasp of the
spirit of the statute. If the Sind Government has failed to
do so, as we consider it has undoubtedly failed to do so,
and has banned the fourteenth chapter and the book without
any moral or legal ground or warrant, and punished the
innocent author for an offence he never committed, then the
action of the Sind Government in the present case is
unquestionably unjust, unscrupulous and immoral.
As observed already, the
Satyartha Prakash
was published
in
1875.
It was in the market ever since. The Criminal
Procedure Code came into force in 1898. If Swami Daya-
nanda Saraswati was really a sedition-monger and
a
communal war-monger, or his
Satyartha Prakash
preached
or was intended to preach sedition and intercommunal
discord and strife, and actually committed the offence
"against the substantive criminal law", the authority of the
statute would have been put in operation against that book
and the crime prevented as soon as the Code found its place
in the statute book, if not earlier. The fact is, it seems to
us, that S. 99A does not and is not intended to cover eases of
books or criticisms of the description of
Satyartha Prakash,
whose sole purpose, as it will be clear even to a most casual
reader of the book, is to preach social reform in India, based
on a principle of synthesis of beliefs and cultures and unity
of religious teachings as well as the oneness of all religions.
It is too late in the day for the Sind League Ministry to
pick holes in that book in order to discover the
criminal
offence where none exists and where none is intended at all.
We have no doubt that the Government Notification of the