DR. RUTHERFORD (Middlesex, Brentford)To ask the Secretary of State for India whether his attention has been drawn to the fact that the Government 524 of India have withheld transmission of a memorial addressed to His Majesty's Secretary of State for India by Thakur Bhairon Singh and two others, nobles of the State of Bikanir, in Rajputana, in the matter of their imprisonment and of the confiscation of their jagirs under orders of the Maharajah of Bikanir; whether the memorial in question has been in consequence forwarded directly to him; is he aware that one of the grounds of complaint is the action of the Government of India in dismissing the memorialists appeal to them without assigning any reason or supplying them with the grounds of their refusal; and seeing that one of the memorialists has died in confinement, and that a second has been recently released by order of the Maharajah, he will take into consideration the case of the third memorialist, whoso alleged offence is identical, and who has been kept strictly imprisoned within the fort at Bikanir since the 2nd January, 1905.
(Answered by Mr. Secretary Morley.) I have been furnished with a copy of the memorial in question, but I have not received it from the Government of India; if they have withheld it, I shall be informed by them in duo course. I gather from the copy of the memorial furnished to me that the order of the Government of India appealed against is a refusal to interfere in a matter of internal policy with the action of the Ruler of a Native State of which the memorialists are subjects. I observe from the last paragraph of the Question that the Ruler of the Native State concerned has released one of the memorialists.