in opposition and became known as the 'Anti-Om Mandali Committee'. On 21 June 1938 this group picketed Om Mandali's premises preventing members from entering. This caused considerable upheaval in the community. Women attending were verbally abused, there was an attempt to burn the premises down and the police made several arrests. Many women and girls were later victims of domestic violence in their homes. The picketing resulted in criminal proceedings being taken against both groups, and on 16 August 1938 the local District Magistrate ordered that Om Mandali be prevented from meeting. This ban was reversed on 21 November 1938 after an appeal to the Court of the Judicial Commissioner of Sindh. In an unusual move the judges directly criticised the District Magistrate for trying to punish the victims for the disturbance caused by the perpetrators and for trying to apply the law according to his own personal bias. Nevertheless, in an increasingly sour atmosphere, Om Mandali had decided to leave Hyderabad and gradually relocated its activities to Karachi in the latter half of 1938. Approximately 300 members moved. On 31 March 1939 the government appointed a tribunal to inquire into the activities of Om Mandali. When the Tribunal made its findings, Om Radhe responded by compiling a book titled Is this Justice? criticising the tribunal, which did not have a constitutional basis and made its findings without taking evidence from Om Mandali. In May 1939 the government used the tribunal's findings to effectively reinstate the ban, declaring Om Mandali an "unlawful association" under section 16 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1908. Nevertheless, Om Mandali continued to hold their Satsangs, and the government did not enforce it. Possibly because of this the committee then hired someone to kill Om Baba, but the attempt was unsuccessful. Expansion In May 1950 Om Mandali moved to Mount Abu in Rajasthan India. From the beginning, the organization's focus had been on education, not worship, and for this reason it renamed itself as Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University. In 1952, after a 14-year period of retreat, a more structured form of teaching began to be offered to the public by way of a seven lesson course. After an unpromising beginning when it almost ran out of funds, from the mid-1950s the Brahma Kumaris began an international expansion programme. Since the 1970s it first spread to London and then to the West. The most visible