JUDGEMENT
Viscount Sumner, J -
(1.)In this action forty-eight plaintiffs joined in suing the Secretary of State for India and the Collector and District Magistrate of Nasik for two kinds of relief, (a) a declaration that certain official notices and orders were ultra vires and invalid, and (b) an injunction permanently restraining all executive action thereunder. Unless the right to the first relief was made out, the prayer for the second necessarily failed. The suit was begun less than two months after notice of the intention to bring it had been given to the respondents. It was dismissed by the District Judge on all grounds, and by the High Court of Bombay as well, but, as to one of the learned Judges, not altogether on the same grounds. The plaintiffs now appeal.
(2.)In April, 1921, serious disorder occurred at Malegaon, in the District of Nasik, Bombay, connected with the Khilafat agitation, and in the consequent unlawful assemblies and riots there was loss of life and much damage to property. The Mahomedan weavers, who formed the large majority of the male inhabitants of the place, were the chief culprits, though it is not likely that they acted without instigation from other parties. Some persons were punished criminally, but the question remained how the injured parties were to be compensated and how order was to be maintained in the future. An inquiry was accordingly held, and amounts were fixed, by way of compensation to persons who had suffered in the riots. The Government decided to put in force the provisions of the Bombay District Police Act No. IV of 1890, and orders were duly made for the employment of additional police at the expense of the inhabitants and for payment of compensation for the injuries sustained. Under these orders the income-tax payers, a small class, and the great body of the weavers were designated as the parties to pay the sums required. No question as to the correctness of these proceedings now arises.
(3.)Under the Act it was for the Collector to get in the amount of the compensation and for the Municipality of Malegaon to enforce payment of the police rate. Both were unable to do so. Coercion of the weavers generally, who had few belongings and lived in the main from hand to mouth, proved to be impracticable. As to the rate payers, the Municipality lacked means of enforcing a general payment, and ware openly set at defiance. By the spring of the following year the position had become exceedingly unsatisfactory. Some small sums had been collected from the income-tax payers but, in spite of much patience on the part of the executive and a lapse of time sufficient to have allayed the original turbulence, the measures taken under the Bombay District Police Act had practically come to nothing.