مذكرة عن السيرة المهنية للسير توماس إدوارد روجرز [و‎‎٤‎٨] (١١٨/٩٥)

^7
Flying years later homeward the route I motored out on it is mainly stony
upland every mile to Istanbul.
I had only been a month in Quetta when there broke out in the province's
Central Jail at Mach what would have been a major jail riot in any country. On
18th May, 1946 prisoners and warders flew at each other at night and by next
morning there were thirty deaths and 172 wounded, many very seriously and 26
of them warders. I reached the jail within an hour or two of receiving word and
found plenty of evidence of the frenzied bloodletting though much had been done
to clean up the worst of the mess. My inspection of the scene and the jail
lay-out served me in good stead for the series of criminal cases which were to
be heard in my court at length before committal to the Court of Session. I spent
many months on the cases because the delays normally sought by police and counsels
on both sides were swollen by the need of many witnesses to recover from their
injuries. I had to be sure that proper weight was given to any failings on the
part of prison staff during the events leading up to the fighting and in dealing
with it.
There were already political overtones in the riot. The Presidents of the
Muslim League in Baluchistan and of the other Muslim political organisation, the
Anjuman-i-Watan visited the jail following the riot accompanied by tribal leaders
whose followers had been killed or injured. The two bodies then held public
meetings in Quetta to express sympathy with the prisoners and condemn the firing
on them. Contemporary official reports noted that for a time the growing political
interest in the visit of the Cabinet Mission to Delhi for discussions on Indian
independence was diverted in Baluchistan to the bloody events at Mach Jail. Yet
the very conservatism of relatively remote and slow-moving Baluchistan both
moderated the degree of political ferment there and, through the influence of the
tribal leaders, worked to sustain the influence of the provincial administration.