INDIANS IN THE TRANSVAAL.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 314, 13 January 1908, Page 2

INDIANS IN THE TRANSVAAL.

TOMANS HEAVILY FINED, PROCESSION oFbLACK FLAGS. Received Jan. 12, 4.14 p.m. Pretoria, January 11, Seven Indians were sentenced at Pretoria to three months' imprisonment for disobeying a magistrate's order to quit the Transvaal. Defendants, in addition, were fined £IOO. Three others were ordered to pay £SO, failing payment of which each is to be imprisoned for a further three months. Four of these had had a large local business connection. Gandhi, the leader of the agitation agaiuet registration, and fire other Indians were sentenced to two months' imprisonment, without hard labor, for having defied the law. At the close of the court proceedings, a procession of Indians marched through the streets of Johannesburg carrying black flags,

On the 4tli October the passive resistance of British Indians to the Asiatic Registration Ordinance the ostensible object of which was to stop an alleged unlawful influx of Indians,'who, it was said, were smuggling into the country at the rate of hundreds a month—led to the publication in the Gazette of a Government notice to the effect that after 30th November all Indians over sixteen found without a registration certificate were liable to arrest and deportation, and that after 31st December no trading license would be issued by the Government or municipalities unless a registration certificate was produced. This a few days after was followed by a warning from Mr. Smuts that the Government intended strictly to enforce the Asiatic law. They were determined, he said, to make the Transvaal a white man's country. They had put their foot down, and would keep it there. The Indian, however, is not without friends. Apart from the Imperial aspect of the question, strong exception is taken to "an insulting Act" which renders "our Indian fellow subjects" liable to "imprisonment, confiscation, nnd expulsion from the colony." Sir W. Wedderburn, a former high official in India, in tie course of a letter to the Press, reminds the public that under the London Convention of 1881 British Indians had "full liberty" to enter and reside in the Transvaal, to own houses and shops, and to trade in person or by agent. And the withdrawal of such privileges and the enactment of differential laws by the Boer Government, he adds, were put forward by Lord Lansdowne and Lord Selborne as an important part orthc casus belli. The Indian has served the Empire faithfully in her hour of peril; and decency, to say nothing of gratitude, should have prevented the introduction of "a degrading system of compulsory registration with offensive precautions for personal identification, such as the faking of elaborate finger-prints suitable only to the criminal classes, and incompatible with their national and religious self-respect.'' : : • ■ '