Revolutionary nationalist inspired by their principled and heroic direct resistance to the injustices of the British colonial regime. The early phase of the Indian National Congress led freedom struggle was moderate in approach epitomized in three Ps, viz., prayer, petition and protest. After the partition of Bengal in 1905, many INC leaders led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Rajpat Rai, participated in what is called more direct resistance to British rule often described as militant nationalism. Subsequently, many younger generation people were inspired into revolutionary movement for Indian Independence, first comprising underground revolutionary actions and later more visible direct resistance and protest against the unjust and unfair British policies.
Rash Bihari Bose is considered as the ‘father of Indian revolutionary movement’. The revolutionary nationalists believed in armed revolution against the British instead of generally peaceful civil disobedience movement led by the INC and Gandhi ji. The revolutionary groups were mainly concentrated in Bengal, Maharashtra, Bihar, the United Provinces and Punjab. The revolutionary nationalist movement gradually engulfed the whole country. Many believe that the revolutionary nationalism gave indefatigable momentum to freedom struggle. The people of India were greatly inspired by the leaders of revolutionary movement which eventually led to large scale people’s participation in the freedom struggle. The movement shook the confidence of the British Raaz to perpetuate their imperialism. India became free not in any less measure by this movement than the non-violent non-cooperation and civil disobedience movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. Many counter history writers believe that had freedom been won through revolutionary movement its nature and quality would have been different. However, looking on freedom struggle through such a counter history should not prompt us to think that freedom struggle was a divided movement. In fact non violent non-cooperation and civil disobedience were greatly supplemented by the revolutionary movements to win freedom for India.
The Beginning of Revolutionary Nationalism
Until the beginning of twentieth century, freedom struggle was mainly led by moderate leaders who resorted to legal and peaceful means to highlight the injustice done by the British rulers against the people of India and demanded redress. Although some Indian National Congress leaders such as the triumvirate Bal-Pal-Lal asserted that freedom struggle should resort to more direct resistance than simply requesting or petitioning the British rulers for protecting rights of the Indian people or getting self rule. But the instances of direct resistance or armed rebellion were very very few and limited till the partition of Bengal.
Partition of Bengal
What could be seen as the most explicit evidence to the British policy of “divide and rule” than the partition of Bengal? The Partition of Bengal (1905), announced on 20 July 1905 by Lord Curzon, the then Viceroy of India, was apparently a territorial reorganization of the Bengal Presidency by the authorities of the British Raj. However, the consequences of the partition of Bengal were far reaching. The reorganization separated the largely Muslim eastern areas from the largely Hindu western areas and the partition of Bengal was implemented on 16 October 1905, it was undone a mere six years later.
The Hindus of West Bengal complained that the division would make them a minority in a province that would incorporate the province of Bihar and Orissa. Hindus were outraged at what they saw as a “divide and rule” policy, even though Curzon stressed it would produce administrative efficiency. The English-educated middle class of Bengal saw this as a vivisection of their motherland as well as a tactic to diminish their authority. In the six-month period before the partition was to be effected the Congress arranged meetings where petitions against the partition were collected and given to impassive authorities. Surendranath Banerjee had suggested that the non-Bengali states of Orissa and Bihar be separated from Bengal rather than dividing two parts of the Bengali-speaking community, but Lord Curzon did not agree to this.[ The partition animated the Muslims to form their own national organization along communal lines. To appease Bengali sentiment, Bengal was reunited by Lord Hardinge in 1911, in response to the Swadeshi movement’s riots in protest against the policy.
The Birth of Revolutionary Philosophy
After the partition of Bengal in 1905 leaders like Aurobindo Ghosh, his brother Barin Ghosh, Bhupendranath Datta, Lal Bal Pal and Subodh Chandra Mullick led the philosophic foundations of revolutionary nationalism in India.
Revolutionary nationalism emerged as a potent political force in Bengal in the wake of the Swadeshi Movement in the first decade of the 20th century and thereafter it worked alongside mainstream nationalism that was represented by the Congress party, sometimes in cooperation, at other times along parallel tracks. The Swadeshi Movement was the expression of the outrage triggered in Bengal by the partition of the province of Bengal in 1905. Though the colonial masters cited administrative reasons, the Bengalis were convinced that the Partition was a Machiavellian move to destroy the unity of the Bengali people, and weaken the political activism of Indian leaders and their demand for freedom.
The revolutionary philosophy was born out of the thinking that the official Congress policy of pleading with and petitioning the government for reforms, which was rejected as “mendicancy”, had proven to be completely ineffective. The revolutionary movement changed the structure, form and tone of Indian nationalist movement. In fact it transformed the freedom struggle into a mass movement by inspiring even the ordinary Indians to resist the exploitative, suppressive and repressive policies of the British imperial government. It brought the freedom struggle from the confined Indian upper middle class and educated echelons to the ground and made the British rulers inconvenient due to participation of people in direct resistance on ground. The revolutionary movement prepared a background for Mahatma Gandhi led mass movement for independence and in that sense it could be described as a forerunner to Mahatma Gandhi’s politics of mass involvement in the freedom struggle.
In fact the revolutionary movement gave a great momentum to freedom struggle in India even if it could not become the mainstream approach to freedom struggle, which gave primacy to non-violent methods based on non-cooperation and civil disobedience. But for revolutionary movements, the gaining of independence would not have been early and non-cooperation and civil disobedience would not have been so effective. The revolutionary movement created an unbearable pressure to the imperial regime by inspiring masses to participate in direct resistance and even sacrifice their lives to the cause of freedom which eventually compelled the British rulers to go from India and grant independence to it.
Swadeshi Movement
Surendranath Banerjee began advocating tougher approaches such as boycotting British goods. He preferred to label this move as swadeshi instead of a boycott. The boycott was led by the moderates but minor rebel groups also sprouted under its cause. Government schools were spurned and on 16 October 1905, the day of partition, schools and shops were blockaded. The demonstrators were cleared off by units of the police and army. This was followed by violent confrontations, due to which the older leadership in the Congress became anxious and convinced the younger Congress members to stop boycotting the schools. The president of the Congress, G.K. Gokhale, Banerji and others stopped supporting the boycott when they found that John Morley had been appointed as Secretary of State for India. Believing that he would sympathise with the Indian middle class they trusted him and anticipated the reversal of the partition through his intervention.
But the extremist leaders did not support withdrawal of Swadeshi and Boycott. This saw growth of two factions in the congress the moderates and the extremist leaders. Dadabhai Naoraji defended the moderates in the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress and succeeded to maintainthe unity of the Congress.
Surat Split
The 1907 Congress was to be held at Nagpur. The moderates were worried that the extremists would dominate the Nagpur session. The venue was shifted to the extremist free Surat. The resentful extremists flocked to the Surat meeting. There was uproar and both factions held separate meetings. The extremists were led by Aurobindo and Tilak. However the mainstream INC moderate did not agree with the views of the extremist leaders. Moderates wanted to go against the British peacefully but Radicals wanted to go against the British violently, but the aim of both was to expel or suppress the British Empire from India..In the Surat session (1907) of INC, it was split into two groups – the Moderates and Radicals. To avoid further collision, the 1908 Congress Constitution formed the All-India Congress Committee, made up of elected members and thus radical leaders were isolated from the mainstream.
Revolutionary Institutions and organizations
The radical and revolutionary nationalism got momentum only after the partition of Bengal. But way back in the late 18th century there too place a rebellion among the sanyasis of Bengal. This is known in history as the Sanyasi rebellion.
The Sannyasi rebellion
The Sannyasi rebellion in Bengal, in the late 18th century took place around Murshidabad and Baikunthupur forests of Jalpaiguri under the leadership of Majnoo Shah Fakir and Pandit Bhabani Charan Pathak. It is referred to as an early war for India’s independence from foreign rule, since the right to collect tax had been given to the British East India Company after the Battle of Buxar in 1764. Some commentators categorized it as acts of violent banditry following the depopulation of the province in the Bengal famine of 1770. In the Eighteenth Century Pandit Bhavanicharan Pathak was the main hero of the ‘Sannyasi Rebellion’ against the British rule and exploitation in the land of Bengal. Sannyasi Rebellion was India’s first anti-British independence struggle. In 1771, 150 saints were put to death, apparently for no reason. This was one of the reasons that caused distress leading to violence, especially in Natore in Rangpur, now in modern Bangladesh. However, some modern historians argue that the movement never gained popular support.
The other two movements involved a sect of Hindu ascetics, the Dasnami naga sannyasis who likewise visited Bengal on pilgrimage mixed with moneylending opportunities. To the British, these ascetics were looters and must be stopped from collecting money that belonged to the company and possibly from even entering the province. It was felt that a large body of people on the move was a possible threat.
The Sannyasi rebellion was the first of a series of revolts and rebellions in the Western districts of the province including (but not restricted to) the Chuar Revolt of 1799 and the Santhal Revolt of 1855–56. There is anecdotal reference of the Rebellion has been done in Bengali literature, in the novels Anandamath(1882) and Devi Chaudhurani (1884), written by India’s first modern novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. The song, Vande Mataram, which was written in 1876, was used in the book Anandamath in 1882 in Bengali and the 1952 movie based on the book. Vande Mataram was later declared to be India’s National Song.
Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar
Anushilan Samiti, an organization operational in the first quarter of the 20th century supported revolutionary means and endorsing even violence for ending British rule in India. The organisation arose from a conglomeration of local youth groups and gyms (akhara) in Bengal in 1902. It had two prominent, somewhat independent, arms in East and West Bengal, Dhaka Anushilan Samiti (centred in Dhaka, modern day Bangladesh), and the Jugantar group (centred at Calcutta).
From its foundation to its dissolution during the 1930s, the Samiti challenged British rule in India by engaging in militant nationalism, including bombings, assassinations, and politically motivated violence. The Samiti collaborated with other revolutionary organisations in India and abroad. It was led by the nationalists Aurobindo Ghosh and his brother Barindra Ghosh, and influenced by philosophies as diverse as Hindu Shakta philosophy, as set forth by Bengali authors Bankim and Vivekananda, Italian Nationalism, and the Pan-Asianism of Kakuzo Okakura. The Samiti was involved in a number of noted incidents of revolutionary attacks against British interests and administration in India, including early attempts to assassinate British Raj officials. These were followed by the 1912 attempt on the life of the Viceroy of India, and the Seditious conspiracy during World War I, led by Rash Behari Bose and Jatindranath Mukherjee respectively.
The organisation moved away from its philosophy of violence in the 1920s due to the influence of the Indian National Congress and the Gandhian non-violent movement. A section of the group, notably those associated with Sachindranath Sanyal, remained active in the revolutionary movement, founding the Hindustan Republican Association in north India. A number of Congress leaders from Bengal, especially Subhash Chandra Bose, were accused by the British Government of having links with the organisation during this time.
Ghadar Movement
The Ghadar movement was an extremist political movement founded by expatriate Indians in early 20th century with an aim to overthrow British rule in India. The Ghadar Party, initially the Pacific Coast Hindustan Association, was formed on 15 July 1913 in the United States but before a decision to create headquarter at Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco was taken at a meeting in the town of Astoria in the state of Oregon in USA under the leadership of Har Dayal, Sant Baba Wasakha Singh Dadehar, Baba Jawala Singh, Santokh Singh and Sohan Singh Bhakna as its president. The members of the party were Indian immigrants, largely from Punjab. Thus Ghadar headquarters and Hindustan Ghadar newspaper were based in San Francisco, California. The early membership was composed mostly of Punjabi Indians who lived and worked on the West Coast of the United States and Canada, but the movement later spread to India and Indian diasporic communities around the world.
Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, some Ghadar party members returned to Punjab to incite armed revolution for Indian Independence. Ghadarites smuggled arms into India and incited Indian troops to mutiny against the British. This uprising, known as the Ghadar Mutiny, was unsuccessful, and 42 mutineers were executed following the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial. From 1914 to 1917 Ghadarites continued underground anti-colonial actions with the support of Germany and Ottoman Turkey, known as the Hindu–German Conspiracy, which led to a sensational trial in San Francisco in 1917. Following the war’s conclusion, the party in the United States fractured into a Communist and an Indian Socialist faction. The party was formally dissolved in 1948.
Key participants in the Ghadar Movement included Bhai Parmanand, Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, Har Dayal, Tarak Nath Das, Bhagat Singh Thind, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barakatullah, Rashbehari Bose, and Gulab Kaur. Although its attempts at overthrowing the British Raj were unsuccessful, the insurrectionary ideals of the Ghadar Party influenced members of the Indian Independence Movement opposed to Gandhian nonviolence.
Hindustan Socialist Republican Association
Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) was an Indian revolutionary organisation founded by Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Sachindra Nath Bakshi, Sachindranath Sanyal and Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee. It was previously known as the Hindustan Republican Army and Hindustan Republican Association (HRA). Responding to the rise in anti-colonial sentiment in 1928, the HRA became the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, with the change of name probably being largely due to the influence of Bhagat Singh. The Hindustan Republican Association’s written constitution and published manifesto, titled The Revolutionary, were produced as evidence in the Kakori conspiracy case of 1924.
Sachindranath Sanyal wrote a manifesto for the HRA entitled Revolutionary, which was distributed around large cities of North India on 1 January 1925. It proposed the overthrow of British colonial rule and its replacement with what it termed a “Federal Republic of the United States of India”. In addition, it sought universal suffrage and the socialist-oriented aim of the abolition of “all systems which make any kind of exploitation of man by man possible.” The policies of Gandhi were criticised and youths were called to join the organisation. The Kakori event occurred on 9 August 1924, when HRA members looted government money from a train around 10 miles (16 km) from Lucknow and accidentally killed a passenger in the process. Significant members of the HRA were arrested and tried for their involvement in that incident and others which had preceded it.
The HSRA’s manifesto titled Philosophy of the Bomb was written by Bhagwati Charan Vohra. The socialist leanings voiced in the earlier HRA manifesto had gradually moved more towards Marxism and the HSRA spoke of a revolution involving a struggle by the masses to establish “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and the banishment of “parasites from the seat of political power”. It saw itself as being at the forefront of this revolution, spreading the word and acting as the armed section of the masses. Its ideals were apparent in other movements elsewhere at that time, including incidents of communist-inspired industrial action by workers and the rural kisan movement.
The Indian National Army
The Indian National Army or Azad Hind Fauj was an armed force formed by Indian freedom fighters/collaborators and Imperial Japan on 1 September 1942 in Southeast Asia during World War II. Its aim was to secure Indian independence from British rule. It fought alongside Japanese soldiers in the latter’s campaign in the Southeast Asian theatre of WWII. The army was first formed in 1942 under Rash Behari Bose by Indian PoWs of the British-Indian Army captured by Japan in the Malayan campaign and at Singapore.
This first INA, which had been handed over to Rash Behari Bose, collapsed and was disbanded in December 1942 after differences between the INA leadership and the Japanese military over its role in Japan’s war in Asia. Rash Behari Bose handed over INA to Subhas Chandra Bose. It was revived under the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose after his arrival in Southeast Asia in 1943. The army was declared to be the army of Bose’s Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind (the Provisional Government of Free India).
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose named the brigades/regiments of INA after Gandhi, Nehru, Maulana Azad, and himself. There was also an all-women regiment named after Rani of Jhanshi, Lakshmibai. Under Bose’s leadership, the INA drew ex-prisoners and thousands of civilian volunteers from the Indian expatriate population in Malaya (present-day Malaysia) and Burma.This second INA fought along with the Imperial Japanese Army against the British and Commonwealth forces in the campaigns in Burma: at Imphal and Kohima, and later against the Allied retaking of Burma.
The end of the war saw many of the troops repatriated to India where some faced trials for treason. These trials became a galvanising point in the Indian Independence movement.The Bombay mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy and other mutinies in 1946 are thought to have been caused by the nationalist feelings that were caused by the INA trials. Historians like Sumit Sarkar, Peter Cohen, Fay and others suggest that these events played a crucial role in hastening the end of British rule. A number of people associated with the INA during the war later went on to hold important roles in public life in India as well as in other countries in Southeast Asia, most notably Lakshmi Sehgal in India, and John Thivy and Janaki Athinahappan in Malaya.
The Great conspiracies during the freedom struggle
Muzaffarpur conspiracy
Khudiram Bose, a revolutionary leader from Bengal, along with Prafulla Chaki, attempted to assassinate a British judge, Magistrate Douglas Kingsford, by throwing bombs on the carriage in which he was suspected to be travelling. But Kingsford was in another carriage. Thus, instead, two British women who were sitting in the carriage that was bombed. The revolutionaries were very brave and courageous but they were frustrated by the magistrate for hhis bias and prejudice against Indians. As police tried to arrest, Prafulla fatally shot himself before the arrest. Khudiram was, however, arrested. He was tried for the murder of the two women, ultimately being sentenced to death. He was one of the first Indian revolutionaries and the second youngest to be executed by the British. At the time of his hanging, Khudiram was a little more than 18 years old. Although Mahatma Gandhi denounced the violence, lamenting the deaths of the two innocent women and disapproved violent methods for freedom struggle, militant nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak, in his newspaper Kesari, defended the two young men and called for immediate swaraj. This was followed by the immediate arrest of Tilak by the British colonial government on charges of sedition.
Delhi Conspiracy
The Delhi Conspiracy case, also known as the Delhi-Lahore Conspiracy, refers to an attempt made in 1912 to assassinate the then Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge by throwing local bomb on the occasion of transferring the capital of British India from Calcutta to New Delhi. Rash Behari Bose, a revolutionary leader made a plan with other underground revolutionaries in Bengal and Punjab for the conspiracy which culminated in the attempted assassination of Lord Hardinge on 23 December 1912, when a homemade bomb was thrown into the Viceroy’s howdah as the ceremonial procession was moving through the Chandni Chowk suburb of Delhi. The Viceroy and vicerine were wounded but survived as they were sitting on an elephant however, servant, holding an umbrella behind him was dead.
Rash Behari Bose, identified as the person who threw the bomb, successfully evaded capture for nearly three years, becoming involved in the Ghadar Conspiracy before it was uncovered, then fleeing to Japan in 1915. A reward of Rs.10,000 (approximately $3,300) was announced for the arrest of bomb thrower, since the identity of the assassin was not immediately known to Government agencies. The investigations in the aftermath of the assassination attempt led to the Delhi Conspiracy trial. The case was filed against Lala Hanumant Sahai, Basanta Kumar Biswas, Bhai Balmukund, Amir Chand and Awadh Behari. On 5 October 1914 Lala Hanumant Sahai was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Andaman Islands, and the other four were sentenced to death for their roles in the conspiracy. Basanta Kumar Biswas was hanged on 11 May 1915 at Ambala Central Jail in Punjab aged twenty and became one of the youngest people to be executed during the Indian revolutionary struggles during the 20th century.
Bolshevik agents and Peshawar Conspiracy
An abortive attempt was made to form a CPI in Tashkent with muhajirs in 1920 by MN Roy and other Indian communists abroad. Out of the 200 muhajirs who crossed over to Russia around the year 1920, some 40 to 50 joined the political and military school at Tashkent and later the Communist University for the Toilers of the East in Moscow. From their foreign office, the British intelligence got the information that batches of trained personnel were being sent to India by the CPI in Tashkent. The first batch reached Peshawar on 3 June, 1921. The British police arrested them as “Bolshevik agents” and started the conspiracy cases. From 1921 to 1927 five conspiracy cases were launched against those early communists and national revolutionaries. The distant town of Peshawar was chosen as the venue of the sham trials, so that it would be easy to fabricate news about Russian or Bolshevik ‘destabilisation polities’ and also the accused would not get the benefit of the Jury System.
The first trial under section 121-A of the Indian Penal Code was started with the arrest of Mohammad Akbar, the principal accused and Bahadur, the Tibetan servant of Md. Akbar on 25 September, 1921. Hafizullah Khan, father of Md. Akbar, was also made co-accused in the first Communist Conspiracy case, “The Crown Vs. Md. Akbar and others” The second conspiracy case was nothing but a continuation of the first one. Mohammad Akbar was again convicted for smuggling out letters from jail and breaking jail discipline. Two other co-accused were Mohammad Hassan of Baluchistan and Ghulam Mehboob of Peshawar for illegal possession of duplicate copies of the said letter. A travesty of trial took place to prove that Md. Akbar was trying to make “contact with his revolutionary colleagues in Chamarkand for the same purpose”. The third Peshawar conspiracy case, otherwise known as Moscow-Tashkent conspiracy case began on 4 April, 1923 (“The Crown Vs. Akbar Shah and seven others” under section 121-A, IPC) in the sessions court of JHR Fraser. Summarising his judgement, Fraser said that the accused “are not being convicted because they have adopted pure communism, but because they are emissaries of the communism adopted by the Bolsheviks and Roy”. The next Peshawar conspiracy case was “The Crown Vs. Mohammad Shafiq”, who surrendered to the British police on 10 December, 1923. The verdict was given on 4 April, 1924 : three years’ RI. No further ‘proof’ was necessary to convict Shafiq because he was an ‘active member’ of the ‘conspiracy’ that was already ‘proved’. The Fifth Peshawar conspiracy case Began in 1927 against Fazl Illahi Qurban on the same charge of “receiving training in Moscow and Tashkent for the same purpose”. He was sentenced to five years’ RI which was later reduced to three years’ RI on an appeal to higher court.
Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy
Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy involves the cases of radical leaders who wanted to throw the British raaj through a socialist or communist movement. The two conspiracy cases, one in Kanpur (1924) and Meerut (1929) were constituted by the British government after the Peshavar conspiracy in 1922. The accused in the cases included, among others, important communist organisers who worked in India, such as S.V. Ghate, S.A. Dange, Muzaffar Ahmad and Akshay Thakur, and members of the émigré party, such as Rafiq Ahmad and Shaukat Usmani. On 17 March 1924, S.A. Dange, M.N. Roy, Muzaffar Ahmed, Nalini Bhushan Dasgupta, Shaukat Usmani, Singaravelu Chettiar, Ghulam Hussain and others were charged that they as communists were seeking “to deprive the King Emperor of his sovereignty of British India, by complete separation of India from imperialistic Britain by a violent revolution” in what was called the Cawnpore (now spelt Kanpur) Bolshevik Conspiracy case. It was alleged that the conspiracy aimed at implementing Comintern plan to bring about violent revolution in India.
Singaravelu Chettiar was released on account of illness. M.N. Roy was out of the country and, therefore, could not be arrested. Ghulam Hussain confessed that he had received money from the Russians in Kabul and was pardoned. Muzaffar Ahmed, Shaukat Usmani and Dange were sentenced for four years of imprisonment. This case was responsible for actively introducing communism to the Indian masses. After Kanpur, Britain had triumphantly declared that the case had “finished off the communists”.
But the industrial town of Kanpur, in December 1925, witnessed a conference of different communist groups, under the chairmanship of Singaravelu Chettiar. Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed, Nalini Gupta, Shaukat Usmani were among the key organizers of the meeting. The meeting adopted a resolution for the formation of the Communist Party of India with its headquarters in Bombay. The British government’s extreme hostility towards the Bolsheviks, made them to decide not to function openly as a communist party, but they chose a more open and non-federated platform, under the name the Workers and Peasants Parties.
Kakori Conspiracy
The Kakori conspiracy was a train robbery that took place at Kakori, a village near Lucknow, on 9 August 1925. It was organised by Hindustan Republican Association (HRA). The robbery was conceived by Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqullah Khan who belonged to the HRA, which later became the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. This organisation was established to carry out revolutionary activities against the British Empire with the objective of achieving independence. Since the organisation needed money for the purchase of weaponry, Bismil and his party made a plan to rob a train on the Saharanpur Railway lines. The robbery plan was executed by Bismil, Khan, Rajendra Lahiri, Chandrasekhar, Sachindra Bakshi, Keshab Chakravarty, Manmathnath Gupta, Mukundi Lal, Murari Lal Gupta and Banwari Lal. One passenger was killed unintentionally. Their leader, Ram Prasad Bismil was arrested at Shahjahanpur on 26 October 1925 and Ashfaqullah Khan was arrested on 7 December 1926 at Delhi.
Meerut Conspiracy Case
The Meerut Conspiracy Case was a case by British rulers in March 1929 against several trade unionists, including three Englishmen, who were arrested for organizing an Indian railway strike. The case was decided in 1933 and the British government convicted 27 leftist trade union leaders under a lawsuit. The British were very concerned about all infiltration of communist and socialist ideas propagated to the workers by the Communist Party of India (CPI). British came harshly against the communists as they perceived that Its ultimate objective was to achieve “complete paralysis and overthrow of existing Governments in every country (including India) by means of a general strike and armed uprising”. The trial immediately caught attention in England, where it inspired the 1932 play Meerut by a Manchester street theatre group, the Red Megaphones, highlighting the detrimental effects of colonization and industrialisation.
Lahore Conspiracy and Bombing of Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi
The Lahore conspiracy case pertains to Shaheed-e- Azam Sardar Bhagat Singh and his associates. Bhagat Singh and an associate, Shivaram Rajguru, both members of a small revolutionary group, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (also Army, or HSRA), shot dead a 21-year-old British police officer, John Saunders, in Lahore, Punjab, mistaking Saunders, who was still on probation, for the British senior police superintendent, James Scott, whom they had intended to assassinate. They held Scott responsible for the death of a popular Indian nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai for having ordered a lathi (baton) charge in which Rai was injured and two weeks thereafter died of a heart attack. As Saunders exited a police station on a motorcycle, he was felled by a single bullet fired from across the street by Rajguru, another revolutionary. Another associate of Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, shot dead an Indian police head constable, Channan Singh, who attempted to give chase as Singh and Rajguru fled.
Bhagat Singh was, thereafter, on the run for many months, and no convictions resulted at the time. Surfacing again in April 1929, he and another associate, Batukeshwar Dutt, set off two low-intensity homemade bombs among some unoccupied benches of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. They showered leaflets from the gallery on the legislators below, shouted slogans, and allowed the authorities to arrest them. The arrest, and the resulting publicity, brought to light Singh’s complicity in the John Saunders case. Awaiting trial, Singh gained public sympathy after he joined fellow defendant Jatin Das in a hunger strike, demanding better prison conditions for Indian prisoners, the strike ending in Das’s death from starvation in September 1929.
On 8 April 1929, Singh, accompanied by Batukeshwar Dutt, threw two bombs into the Assembly chamber from its public gallery while it was in session. The smoke from the bombs filled the Assembly so that Singh and Dutt could probably have escaped in the confusion had they wished. Instead, they stayed shouting the slogan “Inquilab Zindabad!” (“Long Live the Revolution”) and threw leaflets. The two men were arrested and subsequently moved through a series of jails in Delhi. The trial began in the first week of June 2029, following a preliminary hearing in May. On 12 June, both men were sentenced to life imprisonment for: “causing explosions of a nature likely to endanger life, unlawfully and maliciously.” Dutt had been defended by Asaf Ali, while Singh defended himself. There was lot of criticism against bombing of the assembly. Even if it was clear from the low intensity bombs that the two revolutionaries did not want to kill anybody, they responded in the following way to allay the criticism: “We hold human life sacred beyond words. We are neither perpetrators of dastardly outrages … nor are we ‘lunatics’ as the Tribune of Lahore and some others would have it believed … Force when aggressively applied is ‘violence’ and is, therefore, morally unjustifiable, but when it is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause, it has its moral justification.”
Muhammad Ali Jinnah also spoke in support of the strikers in the Assembly, saying: “The man who goes on hunger strike has a soul. He is moved by that soul, and he believes in the justice of his cause … however much you deplore them and, however, much you say they are misguided, it is the system, this damnable system of governance, which is resented by the people.”
Bhagat Singh was convicted of the murder of John Saunders and Channan Singh, and hanged in March 1931, aged 23. He became a popular folk hero after his death. His radical ideas on socialism patriotism and purpose of life inspired the youth of India and electrified a growing militancy in India in the 1930s. He also prompted urgent introspection within the Indian National Congress’s nonviolent but eventually successful campaign for India’s independence
Gandhi’s supporters argue that he did not have enough influence with the British to stop the execution, much less arrange it, but claim that he did his best to save Bhagat Singh’s life. Gandhi always maintained that he was a great admirer of Singh’s patriotism. Gandhi had managed to have 90,000 political prisoners, who were not members of his Satyagraha movement, released under the Gandhi–Irwin Pact. Also Gandhiji pleaded several times for the commutation of the death sentences of Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, including a personal visit on 19 March 1931. In a letter to the Viceroy on the day of their execution, he pleaded fervently for commutation, not knowing that the letter would arrive too late.
Appreciating the contribution of the revolutionaries Jawaharlal Nehru wrote about Bhagat Singh: “Bhagat Singh did not become popular because of his act of terrorism but because he seemed to vindicate, for the moment, the honour of Lala Lajpat Rai, and through him of the nation. He became a symbol; the act was forgotten, the symbol remained, and within a few months each town and village of the Punjab, and to a lesser extent in the rest of northern India, resounded with his name.”