“To all Police Officers and those whom it may concern.
This is to certify that Aminabai, living in House No. —— ———— street, second floor, is hereby granted permission to look out of her own window at His Majesty the King-Emperor, on the occasion of the Royal Progress through Bombay on December 2nd. 1911.
S. M. Edwardes, _Commissioner of Police_.”
As an additional precaution the Commissioner of Police asked the Bombay Government to invest him with special magisterial powers, which would enable him to deal summarily with persons of bad character, whose liberty it might be necessary to curtail during the period of the Royal Visit. The request having been granted, the Commissioner proceeded to remand to jail the majority of the well-known hooligans and bad characters, to the number of 400. Fully another three hundred persons with guilty consciences decided to leave Bombay for a holiday up-country, in the belief that they would be sent to jail if they stayed in the City. In this way the City was cleared of seven or eight hundred of its worst characters, and the daily crime returns subsequently proved that the action thus taken produced a very marked diminution of crime during the period of the Royal Visit. Moreover, respectable townspeople, learning of the incarceration of the criminal classes, were able to leave their houses freely at night to visit the illuminations, without fear of burglaries occurring in their absence or of having their pockets picked in the crowd. Political offenders, who usually belonged to a higher stratum of society, were treated differently. In one or two cases they were remanded to jail for treatment as first-class misdemeanants: but the majority were given the option of spending a fortnight in some place chosen by themselves, the police of that place being warned of their arrival and of the need of keeping them under surveillance. In one instance a _détenu_ asked to be allowed to visit Ceylon, which he had never seen, and he was accordingly sent there in company with a plain-clothes officer of the C. I. D., who duly escorted him back again at the end of fifteen days. The entire absence of any protest on the part of the public or the Indian press against the Commissioner’s action shows that the powers were wielded cautiously and that special measures of this kind were generally accepted as appropriate to the occasion. The wholesale disappearance for the time being of the criminal and hooligan element certainly contributed to the peaceful and orderly progress of the Visit, and produced an immediate and marked decline of crime, which enabled the police to concentrate all their attention on the special arrangements for the functions held during Their Majesties’ stay.