The first three decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a vigorous anti-colonial mobilisation. In addition to grand events such as the First World War, the Ghadar movement, the promulgation of the Defence of India Rules followed by the Rowlatt Acts, the initiation of satyagraha politics and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, many other mobilisations such as the Khilafat and the Non-Cooperation movements also followed. With the Jallianwala Bagh massacre involving military brutality in Amritsar and Lahore, the colonial state of exception had reached its apogee. It had managed to secure its power through spectacular violence but lost authority in the face of resistance.

It is essential to make a quick distinction between power and authority here. In a legal sense, a stable political regime wields power and authority; where power refers to its punitive capacity without necessarily fostering political acceptance amongst the constituency, authority, on the other hand, generates regard for power despite its ability to punish. The first chapter revealed that the colonial state succeeded in replenishing its power through the exhibition of military might but lost substantial authority over its subjects. With the arrival of the Government of India Act, 1919, and the politically cosmetic changes it introduced, a challenge to colonial public order began to be mounted through everyday defiance of colonial law in the form of satyagraha as a tactic introduced by Gandhi. Hereon, the colonial state frequently invoked section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) to deal with what it called ‘unlawful assemblies’. Unlawful assemblies were one of the major everyday challenges of the colonial government. The purpose of this chapter is to map the normalisation of colonial exception through seemingly ordinary laws like section 144 CrPC and curfews, which served as an important colonial tool to criminalise quotidian anti-colonial politics. Both the provisions aimed to prohibit mass gathering, ban public places for public access and individuals from addressing the public and came under the set of laws that dealt with ‘public peace and tranquillity’, that is, public order.

A decade and a half after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the colonial state continued to invoke public-order laws to criminalise politics on the ground