The official investigation framed the protest as criminal conspiracy rather than political expression

Evidence

The questions themselves were strange. Did Rochussen really need to wait a week to verify that Reijnst’s house was stoned? And how much did it matter that Chinese, who owned so many shops in Batavia, had sold walking sticks with concealed blades? (As it turned out, the only ledgers that Van Rees’s police officers could collect were those for some twenty to thirty “tongkat yang pedang” [cudgels with scabbards] sold to a few named [and more unnamed] persons two years earlier.) And given that so many high officials were involved, did it really matter who paid for the lighting? — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 491

Categorization

• XREF: This echoes Foucault’s point about official inquiries constructing governable narratives, and the French Indochina colonial archive work discussed in epistemic anxieties about colonial documentation.