{"book":"adl0973","page":73,"text":"chance left the capital and took shelter in the\nremotest parts of the country, out of the\nreach of the Bacha and his colleagues.\nOthers who could not afford to leave their\nfamilies imprisoned themselves within the\nfour walls of their houses. But even this step\nof voluntary confinement was of no avail to\nthem; they could not escape the wrath of the\ntyrant or his officers. They were hunted out\nand dragged through the bazaars in the most\nignominious manner and large sums of money\nwere extorted from them by torture. In some\ncases the demand was so exorbitant that the\nvictim finding no other choice had to pay\nwith his life. Bands of these marauders\nprowling about the city would catch hold of\npassers-by and make them pay large sums of\nmoney or on their refusal enter their houses\nand take whatever they could lay their hands\nupon. Theoretically the Bacha was the head\nof the state, but in practice every one of his\nofficers had unlimited power and was not res-\nponsible to anybody or answerable under any\ncode of law. Even an ordinary soldier would\ncall himself mustaqil (i.e. independent) and\ncould by his own authority shoot any one who\ndared to incur his displeasure. But of these\n\n44","chars":1191,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0973/00073.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":315,"title":"Progressive Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0973/73","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0973/canvas/73","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0973/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0973_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}