Parliamentary accountability prevented British ‘administrative massacres’ that might have delayed Indian independence.

Evidence

The imperialists had always been deeply resentful that the government of India should have “to justify its existence and its policy before public opinion in England”; this control now made it impossible to proceed to those measures of “administrative massacres” which, immediately after the close of the first World War, had been tried occasionally elsewhere as a radical means of pacification, and which indeed might have prevented India’s independence. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 362

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Arendt have specific documented instances of post-WWI ‘administrative massacres’ as pacification, and where does public-opinion restraint actually hold across imperial history?