Truth Prevails — Page 101
( 101 ) Syed Ataullah Shah went before Mr. Khosla, the Sessions Judge in Gurdaspore. Mr. Khosla reduced the term of imprisonment, and he made some remarks in regard to the Imam of the Ahmadiyya Movement, irrelevant for the case, and offensive against the Imam and the Movement. Naturally these remarks were bitterly resented by the Ahmadiyya community, for they were not a party in the case. Recourse was, therefore had to the legal proceedings in the High Court for getting such unwarrantable passages expunged from the decision in question, under 541 A, of the Criminal Procedure Code. The case was heard by Justice Coldstream, the honourable Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, argued the case for the Ahmadiyya Movement. Justice Coldstream first reproduced the objectionable passages in the judgement of the Sessions Judge, J. D. Khosla as follows: I come to the words: “In order to enforce their argument and further their cause they called into play weapons which would ordinarily be termed highly undesirable. They not only intimidated the person who refused to come within their fold with boycott and ex-communication and occasionally threats of something worse, but they frequently fortified the process of proselytizing by actually carrying out these threats. A volunteer corps was established in Qadian with the object probably of giving sanction to their decrees. ” “This is not altogether an accurate description of the evidence. There is no evidence that the Qadianis intimidated persons who refused to come within their fold other than persons belonging to their community who had left it or had quarrelled with them. There is ample evidence, of which there is corroboration in the statement of the Mirza Sahib himself, that persons who had become obnoxious to the Community were excommunicated or forced by social pressure to leave Qadian, though there is very little to indicate that this pressure was brought to bear illegally. So far as ‘threats of something worse’ concerned, there is the evidence of Abdul Karim, that he was threatened with death. The learned Sessions Judge has believed this. ” (The Punjab Law Reporter PP. 649-650) Then Justice Coldstream gave his own Judgement to the following effect: “The language of the judgement in the present case is in some places as such, must tend to raise a doubt whether the learned judge approached the case from a perfectly fair point of view. Much of it is exaggerated. This is clear from some of the passages to which objection has been taken. As an instance, he describes the Qadiani creed in the beginning of the judgment, where it sets forth some facts which in the opinion of the judge have a bearing on the points