48 SOCIAL SCIENTIST and public servants. This Act was ruthlessly enforced during the First World War, as a result of which 350 printing pressess and 400 publications were penalised, with securities collected amounting to more than £ 40,000. In 1919, the Government armed itself with extraordinary powers under the Rowlatt Act to control the press, to detain people and to try persons without a jury. It was against these laws that Gandhi launched a countrywide civil disobedience movement. Unable to cope with the growing freedom struggle, the colonial rulers resorted to yet greater coercion through the enactment of the Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act 1931, which was so sweeping in its scope that a virtual reign of terror was inaugurated in the country. This law remained in force till the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 when it was superseded by the Defence of India Act. The Press Laws Inquiry Committee in 1948 investigated the 1931 Act and recommended that "in our judgment the retention of this Act on the statute book would be an anachronism after the establishment of a democratic State in India". Yet, despite this recommendation, C Rajagopalachari, the then Home Minister, introduced on August 31, 1951, the Press (Objectionable Matters) Bill, 1951, with the avowed object of dealing with incitement to violence, sabotage and certain other grave offences as well as the publication of scurrilous matters. The Bill was enacted into law in October 1951, and was to be of two years' duration. In 1954, the Act was extended for another two years and it finally lapsed in 1956. The real reasons for the 1951 Act were that the Congress party, which itself had spearheaded the civil disobedience movement, was greatly unsettled by the tumultuous upsurges beginning with the mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy in 1946, followed by extensive strikes and peasant movements, and culminating in the Telengana people's armed struggle. Even then, the Act that the Government had enacted by drawing upon the legacy of the colonial coercive laws was envisaged to be of limited duration. Since then, apart from Jammu and Kashmir and, now Bihar, only Tamil Nadu in 1960 and Orissa in 1962 enacted laws to control the press. The fact that scarcely any case has.come to public notice of the implementation of these laws after their enactment indicates that they may never even have been used. There was, of course, also little or no protest against these laws at the time of their enactment which does show that the state of awareness against them was not as high as today. Today's perceptions of the pernicious consequences of these laws have been moulded and sharpened by the traumatic experience of the Emergency press laws and the vindictive manner in which politicians occupying positions of power in recent years have misutilised these positions to attack the press.2 The two pillars on which the Emergency edifice rested were the