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The vital witness: the Meerut Conspiracy Case and the covert operations of the London Metropolitan Police Special Branch
| The Meerut conspiracy trial was held in India from 1929 and lasted for nearly three years. More than 30 trade union, socialist and communist activists were tried, three of them Britons, they had been arrested following a wave of strikes in India and charged under the Indian penal code. Documents seized in a police raid on the headquarters of the CPGB in London in 1925 were key to the prosecution case. The principle prosecution witnesses were UK Special Branch officers. Metropolitan Police officers spent many months in India despite the costs both financial and to manpower, their presence was considered vital to a successful outcome for the prosecution. Based on Special Branch files and the records of India Office Intelligence in London this paper examines the Meerut arrests and trial as evidence of the policing of political activism in the British colonies from the metropolis. In the wider framework it also considers how this helps explain the role of Special Branch and political policing in the UK. Throughout the interwar period Special Branch operated a sweeping, covert network of surveillance of the political left via informants and infiltration of UK organisations such as the NCCL, NPC, UDC, NUWM. Individuals associated with such organisations were at best thought to be ‘fellow travellers’ and more often labelled communists and subjected to intense Special Branch attention that extended to intercepting mail and tapping telephone calls. This level of interest is difficult to reconcile with the limited progress of the communist party in the UK in this period. However, the detailed intelligence reported to the India Office from the comprehensive Special Branch surveillance of Indian activists, Indian nationalist organisations and their UK contacts locates the policing of political activism in the UK in a wider context. The paper concludes that explanation of the role of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch in this period must take account of the fear of communist insurgency across the British Empire and the policy of policing political activism from the Imperial centre.
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