We broke the banning order many times,… but we took care to cover our backs, you know, so that we wouldn’t be caught, and fortunately we weren’t… People rallied around us.[Listen to Gandhi interview segment] [Listen to second Gandhi interview segment]Banning affected people’s personal as well as the political lives. Banning orders forbade them from leaving their town or city of residence and required them to report to their local police station at least once a week. Moreover, government security police monitored their movements and harassed them at the slightest provocation. Despite these measures, banned people often braved the risk of disobeying their banning orders. Political activist Eddie Daniels, banned from 1979 to 1983, explains the terms of his banning orders and what compelled him to break them:
… I had two other banning orders: one was I had to report to a particular police station regularly every Wednesday, and the other prevented me from going into schools, into universities, into the airport, into locations and they sent me to a magisterial area, within the magisterial area I could only be with one person at a time and oh a lot of things. My mother lived outside my banning area, actually I couldn’t see her legally, so I had to go see her illegally. [Watch Daniels interview segment]The imposition of house arrest restricted the movement of some banned persons even further. This measure required banned individuals to remain inside their home during the weekends and from 6pm to 6am on weekdays. People who wanted to visit the home of persons under house arrest needed to first obtain permission from the security officials; in some cases no visitors were allowed at all (Joseph). The restrictions and stigma associated with being banned generally made it difficult for banned persons to gain or keep employment.