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. Happily such Magistrates are rare. Government, in a letter
dated the 25th February, 1848, state--"that it is the duty of the
magistrates of our districts bordering on Oude to adopt vigorous
measures for preventing the assembling or entertaining of followers
by any party, for the purpose of committing acts of violence on the
Oude side of the frontier.
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