[A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II by William Sleeman]@TWC D-Link book
A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II

CHAPTER I
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Their lands must lie waste or be tilled by men who pay all the rent to them, while they pay nothing to the Oude Government.

The Oude Government has no hope of prosecuting these men to conviction in our Judicial Courts for specific crimes, which they are known every day to commit, and glory in committing.

In no part of India is there such glaring abuse of the privileges of sanctuary as in some of our districts bordering on Oude; while the Oude Frontier Police, maintained by the King, at the cost of about one hundred thousand (100,000) rupees a-year, and placed under our control, prevents any similar abuse on the part of the Oude people and local authorities.

Some remedy for this intolerable evil should be devised.
At present the magistrates of all our conterminous districts require, or expect, that their charges against any offender in Oude, who has committed a crime in their districts, shall be held to be sufficient for their arrest; but some of them, on the other band, require that nothing less than some unattainable judicial proof, on the part of the officers of the Oude Government, shall be held to be sufficient to justify the arrest of any Oude offender who takes refuge in our districts.

They hold, that the sole object of the Oude authorities is to get revenue defaulters into their power, and that the charges against them for heinous crimes are invented solely for that purpose.
No doubt this is often the object, and that other charges are sometimes invented, for the sole purpose of securing the arrest and surrender of revenue defaulters; but the Oude revenue defaulters who take refuge in our districts are for the most part, the tallookdars, or great landholders, who, either before or after they do so, invariably fight with the Oude authorities, and murder and plunder indiscriminately, in order to reduce them to their own terms.
The Honourable the Court of Directors justly require that requisition for the surrender of offenders by and from British officers and Native States, shall be limited to persons charged with having committed heinous crimes within their respective territories; and that the obligation to surrender such offenders shall be strictly reciprocal, unless, in any special case, there be very strong reason for a departure from the rule.* But some magistrates of districts disregard altogether applications made to them by the sovereign of Oude, through the British Resident, for the arrest of subjects of Oude who have committed the most atrocious robberies and murders in the Oude territory in open day, and in the sight of hundreds; and allow refugees from Oude to collect and keep up gangs of robbers within their own districts, and rob and murder within the Oude territory.


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