The Marseilles Assassinations and the Yugoslav Crisis

The origins of both modern terrorism and counterterrorism date to late-nineteenth-century Europe. Before the First World War, Western governments associated terrorism almost exclusively with anarchist violence and left-wing revolutionaries.Footnote ¹³ This was also the case in India. British officials believed that revolutionary movements in India drew inspiration from European anarchist organizations and that Indians traveled to Europe to learn how to manufacture explosives. Colonial administrators in British India used the terms anarchist and terrorist interchangeably to describe revolutionaries. In Russia, social revolutionaries argued that political violence was justified against a despotic regime, leading militant groups in Europe, India, and Palestine to also refer to themselves as terrorists until the end of the 1930s, when the term took on a more pejorative meaning.Footnote ¹⁴

After the First World War, right-wing and nationalist-separatist groups replaced anarchists as the primary supporters of terrorist operations. During the interwar years, terrorism became ideologically fractured, widespread, and, in Europe, often state sponsored, as numerous governments clandestinely aided foreign terrorist groups in proxy wars against their neighbors.Footnote ¹⁵ State-sponsored terrorism in Europe was tied to the peace treaties that ended the First World War. The “revisionist” powers of Hungary, Austria, and Bulgaria opposed the postwar settlements and desired to expand their territory. Benito Mussolini's Italy served as the great power backer of the revisionist bloc, as he advanced expansionist aims in southeast Europe and the Mediterranean. Mussolini also opposed France and her alliance system with the governments of the Little Entente: Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. The countries of the Little Entente and France, victors in the First World War, desired to maintain the Versailles system and to protect their territorial boundaries as established at the Paris peace conference. The Rome protocols and the Balkan pact of 1934 solidified the divisions among the revisionist and status quo powers in the region.Footnote ¹⁶

The assistance provided to the anti-Yugoslav Croatian Revolutionary Organization, or Ustaša (Insurgents/Rebels) for short, by the governments of Italy and Hungary reflected these regional dynamics. Ante Pavelić, the Croat lawyer and founder of the Ustaša, built up his organization from his sanctuary in Italy after King Alexander declared a royal dictatorship in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, soon renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Pavelić intended the Ustaša to carry out terrorist operations against the Yugoslav regime and to eventually lead a Croatian army that would liberate Croatia from Serbian rule. In April 1929, Pavelić and another leader of the Ustaša, Gustav Perčec, traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, and concluded a pact of mutual assistance with representatives of an older anti-Yugoslav terrorist organization, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. The pact provided that the organization would supply the Ustaša with instructors in “terrorist methods,” and shortly thereafter members of the organization traveled to the Ustaša's terrorist training camps in Hungary and Italy. In 1931, Pavelic and Perčec acquired a farm near the Yugoslav frontier, Janka Puszta, where they instigated paramilitary training for Croatian political émigrés. Other training camps were also established in Hungary, all within twenty kilometers of the Yugoslav border.Footnote ¹⁷

The Ustaša conducted raids from its outposts in Italy and Hungary. The Yugoslav government responded to the terrorist attacks in a variety of ways. Diplomatic requests that Hungary and Italy control the Ustaša and stop assisting their endeavors yielded few results. As Yugoslav officials could not force foreign authorities to take action against the Croats, the regime turned to counterintelligence and violent press polemics.Footnote ¹⁸ The clandestine war between Yugoslavia and her neighbors continued to escalate. In March 1933, the “Hirtenberg affair” exposed that Italy was illegally smuggling arms into Hungary.Footnote ¹⁹ Nine months later, Ustaša operatives bungled an attempt on Alexander's life in Zagreb. French disapproval kept the Yugoslav government from releasing evidence that the assassination attempt had been planned with Italian connivance and the assistance of the Italian Military Information Service.Footnote ²⁰

Limited in his actions against Italy, King Alexander attempted to end Hungary's support of Croatian separatist terrorism. The Yugoslav government sent a formal note to Hungary protesting the presence of the Janka Puszta terrorist training camp and the frequent forays of terrorists across the border. Yugoslav authorities demanded that the Hungarian government break up the camps and take measures to end the criminal activities of the Ustaša. A month later the Hungarian government made a partial admission to the existence of terrorists on Hungarian territory, but in May 1934 the government submitted a case to the League of Nations accusing Yugoslav frontier guards of killing Hungarian subjects. After airing their grievances in the League Council, Hungary and Yugoslavia negotiated a modus vivendi on the border question in July 1934.Footnote ²¹

Three months later the Ustaša assassinated King Alexander in the streets of Marseilles, France. The death squad included men trained at the Janka Puszta terrorist camp in Hungary and Pavelić’s bodyguard, Vlado Tchernozemski, a former Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization assassin of Bulgarian nationality. The group traveled first to Switzerland, using authentic Hungarian passports, and then entered France with forged Czechoslovakian papers. Louis Barthou, the French minister for foreign affairs, was not an intended target but, in the confusion of the attack, bled to death along with two innocent bystanders.Footnote ²²

Despite the well-known connections between the Ustaša and the Italian government, the French and British pressured the Yugoslavs to indict only the government of Hungary in their appeal to the League of Nations for justice. In early December the League Council held an extraordinary session to address the Yugoslav complaint. Anthony Eden, the British lord privy seal, was appointed rapporteur. He worked with Pierre Laval, the new French foreign minister, and Baron Pompeo Aloisi, a seasoned Italian representative at Geneva, to steer the Council debates towards a universal condemnation of international terrorism. The statesmen carefully avoided any discussion of Italy's role in arming and harboring the international terrorists or the fact that Ustaša leadership remained under Mussolini's protection. In its final resolution, the League Council pushed aside the specifics of the Marseilles assassinations and employed international law as a panacea for increasing state-sponsored terrorism in Europe. On 10 December 1934 the Council declared that “the rules of international law concerning the repression of terrorist activity are not at present sufficiently precise to guarantee efficiently international cooperation.” The League appointed a committee of experts to draft an international convention to assure “the repression of conspiracies or crimes committed with a political and terrorist purpose.”Footnote ²³

Eden received high accolades for his role in defusing the crisis. American observers at Geneva commended his cleverness and adroit mediation.Footnote ²⁴ The British Section of the Women's International League and the League of Nations Union thanked him for his work.Footnote ²⁵ Eden himself concluded that the prestige of the national government and the League had never been higher. He asserted that, unlike the Sarajevo assassinations, which had sparked the First World War, Britain had intervened quickly and decisively after the Marseilles murders, using the League's machinery to exercise a “restraining influence from the start.”Footnote ²⁶

With the onset of the Second World War, scholars took the opposite view, criticizing British and French policy makers for prioritizing great power interests, particularly rapprochement with Italy, and engaging in “secret diplomacy” to appease Mussolini.Footnote ²⁷ The historian Bennett Kovrig denounced the efforts of British and French officials as pandering to the politics of appeasement, while the political scientist Martin David Dubin dismissed the subsequent antiterrorism conventions as “political theater.”Footnote ²⁸ Eden's resolution failed to deter or penalize governments, such as Mussolini's Italy, from providing refuge for terrorist organizations. Pavelić, head of the Ustaša, continued to reside in Italy until total war engulfed the region and he set up a Croatian puppet state (1941–1945) under Axis protection with murderous consequences for the Balkans.Footnote ²⁹

Praise or criticism of the League's handling of the Marseilles assassinations has remained focused on Europe. Resentment over the territorial settlements of the First World War fueled the diplomatic and clandestine battles between the revisionist and status quo powers, and motivated foreign governments to assist King Alexander's assassins. The League's turn to international criminal law to contain a rebuttal by Yugoslavia produced a definition of terrorism that drew upon legal concepts advanced by European jurists in the Association Internationale de Droit Pénal (International Association of Penal Law) and the International Bureau for the Unification of Criminal Law. Many of the legal reformers involved in European nongovernmental legal organizations served on the League's Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism, which drafted the two antiterrorism treaties signed at the International Conference on the Repression of Terrorism in Geneva on 16 November 1937.Footnote ³⁰

The British Home Office rejected the League's solution to international terrorism because of the conventions’ heavy reliance on continental law and their close association with European politics. These officials considered the treaties to be an attempt by Geneva to dictate policing procedures and domestic antiterrorism legislation. The U.S. State Department took the same position, arguing that the killing of King Alexander and the outcome of the extraordinary session reflected “European political considerations.”Footnote ³¹ The governments of both the United Kingdom and the United States regarded the treaties with suspicion because of the involvement of repressive regimes in the drafting process, particularly the Soviets, whom the Americans considered active proponents of “international terrorist methods.”Footnote ³² Additionally, statesmen in the United Kingdom and the United States argued that the treaties contradicted their countries’ traditional legal practices and cultures, appealing only to authoritarian regimes battling internal dissidents. The League's antiterrorism conventions ultimately served state security by protecting governments from “homegrown enemies” who fled abroad.Footnote ³³ For this reason, and in contradiction to the arguments marshalled against the convention by the Home Office, the terrorism treaty also found favor with the British government of India.

The Antiterrorism Conventions

The League resolution of 10 December 1934 created an expert Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism with delegates from 11 states.Footnote ³⁴ The committee met in April and May 1935, January 1936, and April 1937. A number of the leading European jurists participated in the work of the committee, including Vespasien Pella from Romania, Henri Carton de Wiart from Belgium, Jules Basdevant from France, and John Fischer Williams from the United Kingdom. Carton de Wiart chaired the committee of experts, while Pella served as rapporteur and was the primary architect of the antiterrorism conventions.Footnote ³⁵ European jurists had been involved in efforts to outlaw terrorism since the late 1920s, when the government of Romania had first suggested that the League draft a treaty to criminalize terrorism. In the early 1930s, the International Association of Penal Law convened a series of conferences to consider the subject with contributions from leading legal scholars, such as Raphael Lemkin. For the European members of the committee, the Marseilles murders provided an opportunity to bring legal concepts long advocated by the International Association of Penal Law and the International Bureau for the Unification of Criminal Law into fruition.Footnote ³⁶

The committee began its work with a list of proposals submitted by the French government, which included prohibiting the manufacture of false identity cards and creating an international criminal court that would serve as a penal court for terrorist offenses.Footnote ³⁷ Sixteen governments, including China, Cuba, the United States, and Egypt, responded to the committee's invitation to submit observations on the French proposals and to offer their views on international terrorism.Footnote ³⁸ The British Howard League for Penal Reform sent the committee and the British government a paper that protested against the weakening of the right of asylum and the need to protect political prisoners from inhumane treatment. The committee also received memoranda and draft conventions from the Executive Bureau of the International Criminal Police Commission, based in Vienna, and the International Prison Commission. The International Criminal Police Commission, the predecessor of Interpol, desired to participate with the league's terrorism committee and to serve as a central office for information sharing regarding terrorist activities. Officials in the League Secretariat distrusted the Austrian leadership, as did the French police after the Ustaša assassinations, and the committee of experts declined the commission's request.Footnote ³⁹

Britain's strong stance against the International Criminal Court led the committee to draft two individual treaties and to separate the court from the league by placing it at The Hague. The British argued that “the time has not yet arrived for the creation of the proposed Court” and “harm … is done to international institutions generally by the establishment of an institution which is not supported by the general assent of public opinion.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The Italian representative also opposed the formation of an international court on the grounds that it would “constitute a derogation of state sovereignty.”Footnote ⁴¹ The Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism decided that states could sign one or both treaties but that adherence to the International Criminal Court convention required first signing the terrorism treaty.

Following its second meeting, the committee circulated copies of the two draft conventions to all members of the League to consider before the question was placed on the agenda of the General League Assembly in October 1936. An exhaustive examination ensued with the First Committee of the Assembly devoting four meetings to discussing the various criticisms and proposals submitted by 19 governments. The assembly also adopted a second resolution, reaffirming that it was the “duty of every State to abstain from any intervention in the political life of a foreign State” and to “prohibit any form of preparation or execution of terrorist outrages upon the life or liberty of persons taking part in the work of foreign public authorities or services.”Footnote ⁴² In May 1937, the Council directed its secretary-general to invite members of the League and certain non-member states, including Brazil, Germany, Japan, and the United States, to be represented at a diplomatic conference to consider the two draft treaties.

The International Conference on the Repression of Terrorism met in Geneva from 1 to 16 November 1937. Thirty-five states attended. By the end of 1938, twenty-four states had signed the convention on terrorism, while twelve governments had signed the treaty for an International Criminal Court.Footnote ⁴³ The Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism defined “acts of terrorism” as “criminal acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons, or a group of persons or the general public.” The treaty required states to prevent and punish terrorist acts of an international character and to refrain from encouraging “terrorist activities directed against another State.” The treaty addressed the specific intelligence failures that had permitted the Marseilles assassinations by outlawing conspiracy or incitement to commit terrorist acts and the fraudulent manufacture of identity cards or alteration of passports. In addition, the treaty contained a proposal by the Indian government that required arms manufactures to mark firearms with serial numbers or other distinctive marks and that regulated the carrying, possession, and distribution of firearms, ammunition, and explosives. The supplying of arms, explosives, or harmful substances in the commission of a terrorist crime was also considered an act of terrorism.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Convention for the Creation of an International Criminal Court established a permanent body at The Hague to try persons accused of offenses outlined in the terrorism treaty. The court would sit, however, only when it had cases before it. The court was to consist of five regular judges and five deputy judges chosen from among jurists who were “acknowledged authorities on criminal law” or who had been members of courts of criminal jurisdiction. The treaty directed the court to apply the substantive criminal law that was “least severe” and to consider “the law of the territory on which the offence was committed and the law of the country which committed the accused to it for trial.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The Belgian, Spanish, French, and Romanian delegates, and especially the Romanian jurist Vespasien Pella, worked tirelessly for the enactment of an international penal court for terrorist crimes and considered its creation a “bold innovation” in criminal jurisdiction.Footnote ⁴⁶

France and every member of the Balkan Pact and the Little Entente signed the terrorism treaty, including Bulgaria, which had moved closer to Yugoslavia after suppressing the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in 1934. These governments signed the treaties largely as symbolic measures to show their unity and opposition toward the increasingly militant foreign policies of Italy and Germany. The convention also provided new legal tools to use against restive minorities and political opponents who fled abroad. The Soviet Union signed the terrorism treaty for similar reasons. After joining the League of Nations in 1934, Joseph Stalin's government concluded a number of bilateral treaties with members of the Little Entente, which included provisions to suppress terrorism by agreeing not to harbor foreign terrorists or to provide assistance for their military or propaganda campaigns. The Soviets hoped to use the extradition statutes of the convention to demand the return of White Russians accused of plotting against the government, violating passport restrictions, or distributing weapons. The terrorism convention also appealed to seven states waging campaigns against social revolutionaries and communists in the Caribbean and Central and South America.Footnote ⁴⁷

While French policy makers and jurists viewed the intensification of terrorist activities on the European continent as a pressing security problem, the French government excluded the conventions from applying to its colonies, protectorates, or mandates. The British Home Office regretted this decision, as it meant that the terrorism treaty would not apply to the French settlements in India—Pondicherry and Chandernagore—or to Syria. Consequently, India and Palestine would not derive “any direct advantage from French participation.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In November 1937, the Colonial Office had opposed bringing Palestine or the colonies into the scope of the convention, although Colonial Office officials conceded that a convention of this kind might be of future value in Palestine.Footnote ⁴⁹

Delhi and London Divided

British India signed the terrorism treaty, while the United Kingdom signed neither convention. Despite Anthony Eden's role in proposing an international treaty against terrorism and the support that the convention continued to receive in the Foreign Office, legal advisors in the Home Office rejected the treaty on legal and political grounds. The Home Office disagreed with the convention's definition of terrorism and its alleged implications for free speech, extradition, political asylum, and assisting foreign insurrectionaries.Footnote ⁵⁰

British Home Office officials believed that the terrorism treaty too broadly defined terrorism, giving states the power to repress rebellions, insurrections, or coups-d’état. They argued that violent rebellion was at times justified against despotic regimes. Leslie Stuart Brass, the Home Office deputy legal adviser, elaborated that, “If all States were at all times decently governed, presumably anyone who attempted by force to overthrow an existing government should be a hostis humani generis but when the government is itself a terrorist government, I think a person who endeavors to overthrow it by the only means available is not necessarily to be so regarded.”Footnote ⁵¹ In cases where no constitutional means existed for changing a bad government, the Home Office considered that force might be necessary. Consequently, British policy makers believed that the terrorism convention should not “make it more difficult to change existing governments by revolutionary methods, but to discountenance the use for political purposes of methods which all civilized opinion must condemn.”Footnote ⁵² The British further ensured that the terrorism convention did not apply to civil wars.

Additional Home Office opposition towards the terrorism treaty stemmed from its requirement to extradite alleged terrorists. The political climate of the 1930s made this proposition unacceptable to British policy makers, as they believed that most requests would come from Germany, Italy, and the Balkan states. As Brass recognized, the terrorism convention would likely increase the work of Britain's lead antiterrorism agency, the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, and cause trouble if “enthusiastic Italians and Germans” called for the “removal of anti-Nazi fellow subjects.”Footnote ⁵³ The commissioner of the Special Branch agreed, remarking that “we shall have to do a great deal more work for other countries than we shall be able to ask them to do for us. It would help us I suppose to get rid of an odd undesirable alien and cause us a great deal of difficulty in cases where political asylum is claimed.”Footnote ⁵⁴

In addition, the Home Office dismissed any suggestion that the United Kingdom send political refugees to an international criminal court or surrender persons in respect to crimes of a political character.Footnote ⁵⁵ Home Office officials worried that the terrorism treaty placed them under “an international obligation to punish sympathizers here who encourage or help oppressed minorities abroad to secure political liberty if other than purely peaceable methods (which methods would probably be useless to them) are employed.” Footnote ⁵⁶ Here, Brass and the other legal advisors in the Home Office were thinking of Europe and the violent expansion of fascism, Nazism, and communism across the continent. These officials viewed English culture and law as protective of civil liberties and distinctly different from the authoritarian regimes engulfing Europe.

Finally, the lack of domestic terrorism in the United Kingdom led Home Office officials to believe that Parliament would not change British criminal law or enact legislation that threatened British traditions, such as free speech.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Home Office argued that the “existing system provided all that was necessary for public safety in this country, and we [have] no evidence of terrorists operating here to justify amendment of the law.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Because of the “absolute disinclination on domestic political grounds to propose legislation in the House of Commons on the subject of the Convention,” Home Office officials concluded that the British government should not become a party to the terrorism treaty.Footnote ⁵⁹ In their discussions of the convention, policy makers in the Home Office rarely considered militant violence in Ireland, India, or Palestine. Continental Europe was the foil, and as articulated by Brass, the enactment of legislation that violated civil liberties and human rights was a greater danger than terrorist activity.

Despite Home Office opposition, the United Kingdom participated in the terrorism conferences and influenced the language and content of the conventions. Eden took a special interest in the matter and fought bitterly with Home Secretary John Simon to keep Britain engaged.Footnote ⁶⁰ As the Foreign Office made clear, noninvolvement in the drafting process would offend the French and was “very likely to bring the whole thing to a ground, [and] would be felt in Yugoslavia and perhaps elsewhere as a running-away from a sort of gentlemen's understanding to make the way of the terrorists, so tragically successful at Marseilles, a little more dangerous and difficult.”Footnote ⁶¹ The recent breakdown of the World Disarmament Conference loomed over Eden and the Foreign Office. Another failed negotiation at Geneva would further embarrass and discredit the League and possibly damage Britain's credibility in the international arena. Concerns about harming relations with key partners, particularly France, ensured that the British government remained politically committed to participating in the League's endeavors to criminalize international terrorism.Footnote ⁶²

In contrast to London's internal debates about the terrorism treaty, the Government of India immediately signaled its intent to support the convention. Although the British Raj combated revolutionary terrorism for over half of the twentieth century, the history of the armed struggle is not well known. The historian Peter Heehs argues that this is because the image of Gandhi and the success of his techniques, civil disobedience and noncooperation, obscured the role of violent revolutionaries in the national movement. Heehs believes that Gandhi gained greater bargaining power because of the unspoken threat of violence that he personally opposed. The records of British intelligence and police agencies indicate that colonial authorities feared the revolutionary organizations and considered terrorism to be a credible threat to British rule.Footnote ⁶³ British officials and law enforcement equated terrorism with violent tactics employed by individuals or small groups that fell short of a full insurrection. As the British Arms Act of 1878 had effectively disarmed the populace, revolutionary terrorists undertook relatively small-scale acts of covert violence, such as dacoities (gang robberies); assassinations; or assassination attempts of high-ranking government officials, police officers, informants, and European civilians.Footnote ⁶⁴

The British labeled the Ghadr Party, the Hindustan Socialist Republication Association, and the militant Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar party, composed primarily of Bengali revolutionaries from the bhadralok (Hindu upper castes, educated elite), as terrorist groups. These organizations waged an armed campaign against British rule from inside India and from abroad in foreign countries. The Chittagong Armory Raid of April 1930, modeled after the Irish Easter Rising, ushered in a new wave of anticolonial violence.Footnote ⁶⁵ While the province of Bengal remained the center of revolutionary activity, terrorism in the 1930s differed from earlier campaigns because of the active involvement of female assassins and liaisons, communism's simultaneous expansion, and the emergence of an interconnected “violence movement” capable of carrying out coordinated bombing attacks in various provinces, including the Punjab, the United Provinces, and Assam.Footnote ⁶⁶

The British employed a multifaceted approach to countering terrorism in India. This included domestic antiterrorism legislation, arms interdiction, and a global intelligence apparatus that monitored diaspora groups and gunrunning enterprises.Footnote ⁶⁷ Emergency antiterrorism powers in India, as in the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Free State, derived from the wartime Defense of the Realm Acts, 1914–1918.Footnote ⁶⁸ The colonial state's “monopoly on violence” enabled authorities to impose martial law during “emergencies” and to suspend the political and civil rights of Indian subjects.Footnote ⁶⁹ Proximity to violence, however, had a profound impact on a government's willingness to violate established legal practices and precedents. The Bengal government, the administration closest to terrorist violence, was the most willing to rescind civil liberties in the name of public safety. London acted as a restraining force and limited Delhi's options for preventing and penalizing political violence. The codification of antiterrorism laws in British India was a deeply contested and negotiated process that divided London and Delhi for the duration of the interwar period.

The government of India enacted the Revolutionary and Anarchical Crimes Act, known as the Rowlatt Act, immediately after the First World War in early 1919. The law followed the recommendations of the Rowlatt Committee and extended wartime controls ordained by the Defense of India Act, 1915, including trials of seditious crimes without juries, into peacetime.Footnote ⁷⁰ Protests against the law resulted in the Amritsar massacre, in which British troops fired into an unarmed crowd in the Punjab, and fueled Gandhi's noncooperation movement. In response to the massive demonstrations against the Revolutionary and Anarchical Crimes Act, the government of India issued a royal proclamation in 1919 that released hundreds of interned political prisoners. The government's amnesty was gradually extended to most of the leaders of the revolutionary movement. In March 1922, the government of India arrested Gandhi for sedition and for encouraging anti-British agitation. His arrest led to a revival of political violence, especially in Bengal.Footnote ⁷¹

The terrorist movement regrouped in Bengal under the cover of legal political groups connected to the noncooperation movement. Lord Lytton, the governor-general of Bengal, petitioned the government of India and the viceroy, Lord Reading, for special powers to arrest revolutionaries and check the terrorist movement. Lord Reading first authorized the arrest of certain leaders under the provisions of Regulation III of 1818, a statute from the days of the East India Company that had been revived in Bengal during the anti-partition violence of 1905. While Regulation III of 1818 allowed the police to arrest high-ranking members of the terrorist movement, new leaders quickly replaced them.Footnote ⁷²

Lord Lytton protested again for broader powers in the form of an ordinance that would enable the police to target and intern rank-and-file members of the terrorist movement. In October 1924, Lord Reading granted the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, empowering authorities to initiate large-scale sweeps to arrest militant revolutionaries.Footnote ⁷³ The Bengal government and the viceroy of the government of India wanted to codify the emergency ordinance into permanent legislation. The London-based India Office opposed this step, while the cabinet hesitated to extend “special powers” to the Bengal government or the government of India to deal with the “conspiracies of violence.” The India Office and cabinet assented to allowing the government of India to search for arms and explosives; however, government officials in London worried that the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance suggested that the British government was not willing to cooperate with Indian political parties for Indian self-government.Footnote ⁷⁴

Lord Oliver, the Liberal secretary of state for India, criticized the ordinance on the grounds that it stifled political freedom broadly and would be used against the Swaraj political party and its leader, C. R. Das. Oliver's position reflected the lessons that the British had recently learned in Ireland. Unrestrained state violence did not further the government's cause and alienated crucial mainstream groups. The cabinet believed that the Bengal government, and the government of India to a lesser degree, had a “constant tendency to identify not only the Swarajist political party, but the whole of the progressive movement in India with the Bengali terrorist organisations and their conspiracies.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The cabinet was also aware of the vehement opposition among Indians towards the proposed legislation. By the end of November 1924, there had been over a hundred public meetings to protest the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance and numerous resolutions passed that condemned the law as “repressive and calculated to stifle legitimate political activities.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In 1925, a supplementary act was added to the ordinance. Thereafter the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance was known as the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act.

The Bengal government desired to codify the emergency powers in permanent legislation and introduced a bill in the Bengal legislative council. The legislative council, however, refused to consider the measure, and the Bengal provincial council voted to repeal the Criminal Law Amendment Act. The decision of the legislative council to oppose the antiterrorism legislation led the governor-general to enact the Criminal Law Amendment Act through a special decree that allowed for the law to remain in force for five years. The temporary ordinance expanded the government's powers of arrest and surveillance and enabled officials to try terrorist cases under closed tribunals rather than public jury trials.Footnote ⁷⁷

With most revolutionary leaders in jail or exile, terrorism decreased significantly under the Bengal Criminal Law Act of 1925. Between its issuance and the end of 1928, only one murder by terrorists occurred. By 1928, the British had released almost all of the revolutionaries arrested under the special legislation and Regulation III of 1818.Footnote ⁷⁸ While the law contained political violence in Bengal, authorities ascertained that terrorist cells were emerging in other provinces. Many terrorists went underground or fled to Burma, where the terrorist movement regrouped. In the late 1920s, the Bengal Intelligence Bureau began reporting that revolutionary leaders were recruiting and collecting arms and bombs. In January 1930, Bengal administrators warned the government of India that the expiration of the emergency ordinance would increase the likelihood of a terrorist outrage and shake the morale of the police.Footnote ⁷⁹

With the expiration of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1925, the Bengal government lost its antiterrorism powers at the same time that police were engaged in controlling mass protests connected to the civil disobedience movement. It was at this opportune moment that nearly 100 revolutionaries stormed the armories in Chittagong, a seaport city in East Bengal near the Burmese border, on 18 April 1930. Inspired by the martyrdom advocated by Irish nationalists, such as Patrick Pearse and Dan Breen, the young revolutionaries who carried out the Chittagong Armory Raid intended the attack to instigate armed conflict across India.Footnote ⁸⁰ While the uprising's immediate aim failed, recruits poured into the various terrorist groups, including women and young girls. The “sinister” emergence of female assassins created new policing problems for the British. Past surveillance techniques focused on young men, and British law enforcement officials were limited in their abilities to interrogate suspected female terrorists. The involvement of elite women in the revolutionary movement provided a powerful propaganda tool for nationalist leaders and inspired other women to take action.Footnote ⁸¹

After the Chittagong Armory Raid, the emergency powers of arrest and detention were immediately conferred by a new ordinance. In July, the Bengal government asked for the replacement of the ordinance by permanent legislation. The legislative council deferred, and the Bengal Act VI of 1930 was again limited to five years. The government of India, however, considered existing legislation, including the renewed Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, as “insufficient to cope with the menace.” The government granted additional emergency powers to the Bengal government, including a Press Act that prohibited incitement to murder or violence in the public press and another Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinance, which extended the powers of commandeering property, imposing collective fines, and regulating traffic and transport to the district magistrate of Chittagong. This law also expanded the definition of “absconders” to include anyone who evaded internment or refused to give information to authorities. In 1932, the Legislative Council passed two more pieces of emergency legislation: the Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act and the Bengal Criminal Law (Arms and Explosives) Act. In addition to using instruments of law to combat terrorism, the government of Bengal deployed its police and military.Footnote ⁸²

By 1934, the police had arrested 3,110 persons for terrorist crimes. Most political prisoners were detained in camps and prisons within Bengal at Buxa, Hijli, and Deoli. In 1931, British guards opened fire on unarmed detainees during an uprising at the Hijli detention camp, killing two prisoners and wounding three. Protests and hunger strikes at the detention camps and prisons spotlighted prison conditions and the mass incarceration of alleged terrorists without trials in national and international news. The prison system represented colonial control and subjugation under a “rule of law” pretense and emerged as a major site of anti-government sentiment.Footnote ⁸³ During the 1930s, the Communist Party of India launched a recruitment drive in the jails of Bengal. As many as 1,000 imprisoned terrorists joined the Communist Party of India during the “communist consolidation movement.” The party grew from thirty-seven members in 1934 to more than a thousand converts in 1942. Five years later the party boasted a membership of almost twenty thousand.Footnote ⁸⁴

Since the end of the First World War, the government of India had focused on the activities of the Communist International, known as the Comintern and the attempts of Comintern agents to coopt Indian nationalist and revolutionary groups.Footnote ⁸⁵ The government believed that the Comintern and the Russian and British communist parties supplied Indian revolutionaries with money and logistical support. As many communist agents were also British subjects, colonial officials desired an immigration act that would permit the government of India to deport British subjects convicted of organizing subversive activities. In 1927, Lord Birkenhead, the secretary of state for India, requested that London reform the passport system to keep “British subjects, well known to be Communists,” from traveling to India.Footnote ⁸⁶ His request was never granted. The British Raj banned the Communist Party of India in 1934, after the British communist party called for open revolution in India and the party-sponsored mass strikes in the textile industry.Footnote ⁸⁷

The Raj's domestic antiterrorism legislation worked when in place, but it also created significant problems. The legislation's expiration every five years undermined police and intelligence work. The internment of political prisoners in a mass detention-camp system helped to expand communism's reach and to radicalize alleged terrorists. The emergency powers were also deeply controversial in London and in India, where they tarnished Britain's justifications for ruling India and demonstrated that colonial administrators would violate the civil liberties of Indian subjects in the name of public security.Footnote ⁸⁸ Indian politicians and the Howard League for Penal Reform protested the government's unrestrained powers of arrest and detainment and demanded a repeal of the antiterrorism legislation. Consequently, between the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1939, the government of India closed many of the detention centers and released political prisoners if they disavowed violent activity.Footnote ⁸⁹

The political storms caused by the special ordinances persuaded the government of India to focus on preventing weapons from reaching terrorist organizations, thereby decreasing the need for coercive legislation at home. The colonial regime received information regarding illicit arms trafficking from imperial and metropolitan intelligence agencies. Its own Home Department ran an Intelligence Bureau and, in conjunction with the India Office, oversaw a global intelligence agency, Indian Political Intelligence. The agency worked with the Security Service, MI5; the Secret Intelligence Service (later known as MI6); and the Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, an interagency commission that operated from 1922 to 1927. As noted by the historian Durba Ghosh, the committee was one of the first efforts of the British government to wage a global war on terrorism.Footnote ⁹⁰ At the recommendation of Edwin Montagu, secretary of state for India, the committee monitored groups that posed a threat to the interests of the British Empire, including Turkish nationalists; Egyptian nationalists; Indian nationalists; the pan-Islamic movement in Anatolia, Turkey, and Asia; the Committee of Union and Progress; and Indian revolutionaries in Europe, America, and Asia.Footnote ⁹¹ Meetings of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest attempted to analyze information received from various departments about anti-British movements and to suggest policing and policy responses.

The First World War had elevated the importance of intelligence agencies for safeguarding British India. During the war, intelligence analysts had thwarted an open revolt in the Punjab, planned by the Ghadr Party from its outposts in North America and Europe, and disrupted large shipments of arms from German agents to revolutionary terrorists in Bengal. The intelligence victories rendered the security services permanent after the war.Footnote ⁹² In the 1920s, the intelligence agencies turned their attention to determining the origins of gun-running into India. Their analyses found a receptive audience in the government of India and the India Office, while the Foreign Office tended to dismiss the reports of Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest as imbued with conspiracy theories.Footnote ⁹³

Although British officials feared that large caches of firearms “sufficient to encourage the madness of open revolution and anarchy” would be trafficked into India, intelligence collected in the mid-1920s indicated that arms did not reach India in bulk shipments.Footnote ⁹⁴ Instead, lascars and sailors on ships smuggled small arms, including sub-machine guns, revolvers, and automatic pistols, into British India in ones and twos. Revolutionary nationalists, such as Rash Behari Bose in Japan, and brokers and profiteers, incentivized by profits not politics, moved weapons into India, often using routes established by the drug trade in opium and cocaine. The majority of weapons derived from the European ports of Hamburg, Antwerp, and Marseilles. French settlements also facilitated the arms trade, especially those areas bordering Madras, and served as propaganda centers and safe havens for terrorists.Footnote ⁹⁵

When terrorism revived in India after the Chittagong Armory Raid of April 1930, the Intelligence Bureau of the government of India's Home Department and Indian Political Intelligence returned to the “old question of arms smuggling into India.”Footnote ⁹⁶ During the summer of 1932, the government created a special police staff to combat the trafficking of firearms through the port of Calcutta and held two conferences in Simla and London to coordinate government policy and to prevent Indian terrorists from acquiring small arms. The conferences reinvigorated efforts to improve information sharing among law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and local governments in India and efforts to strengthen cooperation with shipping companies and customs officials.Footnote ⁹⁷ The government of India also desired that European governments assist in monitoring their ports and punish those involved in gun-running.

Colonial administrators believed that, without international cooperation, the government's attempts to stymie the arms trade would be futile. In the early 1930s, British India officials, such as C. M. Trivedi, offered a number of possibilities for bringing the question of arms smuggling to the League of Nations, including raising the subject at the Disarmament Conference, amending the 1925 Arms Traffic Convention, or proposing a new treaty. Trivedi suggested that since “The League of Nations have tackled subjects such as illicit traffic in drugs and traffic in women and children … they may well take up the question of illicit traffic in arms, which affects many countries.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The government of India took the position that a licensing system would decrease illegal transfers of weapons and provide essential information for police investigations of terrorist crime in India. It requested the India Office's help in drafting a proposal to place before the League of Nations. After discussing the matter with the Foreign Office, the India Office declined to assist such a measure, advising instead that the government pursue bilateral treaties with Belgium, Germany, and France.Footnote ⁹⁹

The League's consideration of international terrorism offered British India an opportunity to bypass London and to advance international arms controls by different means. The government's Home Department indicated to the India Office that the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism appealed to the colonial regime because it would (1) prevent foreign countries from providing asylum to “Indian terrorist criminals”; (2) empower foreign governments to arrest Indians abroad who financially or materially supported terrorist conspiracies against persons in India, specifically mentioning the Ghadr Party and its operations in the United States, Europe, and Afghanistan; (3) criminalize supplying forged or falsified passports to terrorist conspirators in foreign countries; (4) regulate the manufacture, sale, and possession of revolvers and pistols; and (5) enable the government of India to address arms smuggling through foreign possessions in India, noting French settlements and the French postal service in particular.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The British Home Office was not completely convinced. Findlater Stewart at the India Office reminded his colleagues in London that with the French in their present mood there was a “golden opportunity” for effective action. Stewart stressed the troubles faced by John Anderson, the current governor of Bengal, in suppressing revolutionary terrorism and urged the Home Office to support the British government's antiterrorism campaign in India. The government of India maintained that, so far as the Indian terrorist was concerned, “his potential danger would be reduced very considerably if steps could be taken to prevent him from arming himself with revolvers and pistols.” Overt lobbying by Indian policy makers in London and Geneva ensured that the terrorism convention included a provision that carefully controlled the manufacture and sale of easily concealed firearms, such as submachine guns, revolvers, and pistols. India's position as the only non-self-governing member in the League enabled the government to forge an independent path at Geneva and to sign a multilateral treaty that no other Commonwealth state supported.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Both the governments of the United Kingdom and British India deemed their performance successful at the League's 1937 International Conference on the Repression of Terrorism. British India officials had their arms treaty—an international agreement that London policy makers had opposed four years earlier. The United Kingdom delegation had severed the International Criminal Court from the League of Nations and incurred no political commitments. Leslie Brass and John Fischer Williams, the British representatives for the United Kingdom, felt that they had convinced their colleagues that Britain sympathized with the general objectives of the terrorism treaty but that its “provisions did not easily fit into the legal framework of the United Kingdom.”Footnote ¹⁰² A month after the final conference, Home Secretary Samuel Hoare thanked the delegation for its work: “To steer a successful course between the risk of committing our Government to legislation that would have run contrary to our traditions and the risk of appearing unsympathetic towards measures for the repression of terrorism cannot have been easy and I feel that we are all much indebted to you.”Footnote ¹⁰³ In 1939, Hoare maneuvered the Prevention of Violence Act (Temporary Provisions) through Parliament. This law gave the government and police “exceptional powers” to check Irish Republican Army terrorism and drew upon many of the same practices of the Bengal ordinances.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Despite the Home Office's earlier rhetoric about the need to protect civil liberties, the home secretary and legal advisors in the Home Office readily called for national legislation when they were the gunman's target.