Revolutionary terrorism was the form of political action adopted by the generation of motivated nationalist youth whose creative energies failed to find adequate room for expression within the existing political trends.

Factors leading to revolutionary trends

The Extremists’ critique of Moderate politics had convinced them of the futility of trying to convert the British rulers by petitioning and reasonable argument. They had participated actively in the Swadeshi movement in the hope and belief that Extremist methods of agitation such as boycott, passive resistance etc., would take the national movement out of its elitist groove. They expected that this movement would bring the British Government to its knees. The Swadeshi movement was only partially successful in mobilising vast sections of the masses. It also could not secure the reversal of the partition of Bengal. This failure was however, almost inevitable. Firstly, because it was the first major attempt at mass mobilization and secondly its methods were new and unfamiliar both to those who advocated them and to those who hesitated to adopt them. It led to a growing sense of impatience and frustration among the youth who began to feel that perhaps something even more dramatic was needed to arouse the people.

The inability of the Extremist leadership to either adequately analyse the weaknesses of the movement or to suggest new ways out of the impasse further strengthened this trend. Some sections of the leadership, such as Aurobindo Ghosh, in fact supported the new trend. Those who did not quite agree preferred to remain silent rather than come out in open criticism, perhaps out of a feeling that this would be playing into Government hands.

Another factor that helped the growth of the trend of revolutionary terrorism was the brutal repression of the Swadeshi movement by the Government. For example the police made the unprovoked assault on the peaceful crowd at the Barisal Political Conference of 27th April 1906 which had led the nationalist paper Jugantar to give the call: “Force must be stopped by force”. The Government’s ability to repress was considerably enhanced by the split that took place in the Indian National Congress at Surat in 1907 between the Moderates and the Extremists, since it removed or at least reduced the danger of alienating the Moderates in the event of repression of the Extremists. Luring the Moderates with promises of constitutional reform, the government proceeded to launch an all-out attack on the Extremists; Tilak was sentenced to six years of exile in Burma, Aurobindo Ghosh was arrested in a revolutionary conspiracy case. During this period a whole generation of nationalist youth especially in Bengal, were angered by repression and convinced of the futility of the moderate path and were impatient with the inability of the extremists to either extract immediate concessions from the government or to achieve a full scale mobilisation of the masses.

This young generation turned to the path of individual heroic action or revolutionary terrorism, a path that had been taken before them by the Irish nationalists and the Russian Nihilists. Though believing in the necessity, in the long-run, of an armed mass revolt by the people in order to overthrow imperialism, the daunting nature of this task as well as of attempts to subvert the loyalty of the army left them with only one choice for immediate action: assassination of individual British officials, especially the unpopular ones. This was done:

in order to strike terror among officialdom;

remove the fear and inertia of the people; and

arouse their nationalist consciousness.

Early activities

Though the trend of revolutionary terrorism acquired a real force only around 1907-8, there had been earlier examples as well:

As early as 1897 the Chapekar brothers of Poona-Damodar and Balkrishna-had assassinated two British officers.

In Maharashtra again, by 1904, V.D. Savarkar and his brother Ganesh had organised the Mitramela and the Abhinav Bharat as secret societies.

After 1905, many newspapers and individuals started advocating this form of political action. In 1907, there was an attempt, though unsuccessful on the life of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal.

The real launching of the new trend is, however, identified with the throwing of a bomb in April 1908, by Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki on a carriage in which they believed Kingsford, the unpopular district judge of Muzaffarpur, to be travelling. But unfortunately, the carriage was carrying two British ladies who were thus inadvertently killed. Prafulla Chaki shot himself dead rather than be arrested, but Khudiram Bose was arrested and later hanged. The government also used the opportunity to involve Aurobindo Ghosh, his brother Barindra Kumar Ghosh and many others in a conspiracy case in which Aurobindo himself was acquitted but his brother and many others were sentenced to deportation and harsh prison terms.

Formation of Secret Societies and Revolutionary Activities: The repression by the British triggered off the formation of secret societies and a spate of assassinations and what were termed as ‘swadeshi’ dacoities to raise funds for buying arms, etc. In Bengal, which became the main centre of revolutionaries, the organisation of revolutionary activities was spearheaded by the Anushilan and Jugantar societies. In Maharashtra, Poona, Nasik and Bombay became centres of revolutionary activity. In Madras, Vanchi Aiyar of the Bharata Matha Association assassinated an official who was responsible for firing on a crowd that was protesting the arrest of the Extremist leaders Chaidambaram Pillai. In London, Madan Lal Dhingra killed Curzon Wylie, an Indian Office official and Rashbehari Bose organised a daring attempt on the life of the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, as he entered Delhi on 23rd December, 1912. Other revolutionaries, such as Shyamji Krishna Varma, Lala Har Dayal, V.C. Savarkar, Ajit singh and Madame Cama established centres in Europe from which they could continue to spread the revolutionary message and render assistance to comrades at home. In all, it was estimated that 186 revolutionaries were either killed or convicted in the years 1908-1918.

Decline of the revolutionary trend

Stern repression facilitated by a series of draconian laws and the lack of a popular response led to the gradual decline of this wave of revolutionary terrorism. Individual heroic action undoubtedly earned the revolutionaries a great deal of popular adulation and sympathy, and many of them such as Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki became folk heroes. By its very nature, however, this form of political action could only be emulated by a few individuals, and not by the mass of people, who still awaited a movement that could accommodate their weaknesses and make effective use of their strengths.

The Gadar movement

The First World War broke out in 1914 and to many Indian nationalists it appeared that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had arrived to take advantage of Britain’s difficulty. Being embroiled in the war, it was felt, Britain would not be in a position to effectively answer a nationalist challenge. The challenge was thrown by two very difficult groups of nationalists, the Gadar revolutionaries based in North America, and the Home Rule Leagues of Tilak and Annie Besant in India. We shall first discuss the Gadar Movement.

Background of the movement

The Gadar revolutionaries were recruited largely from the ranks of Punjabi immigrants who had settled on the West Coast of North America at least since 1904. They were mostly debt-ridden and land-hungry peasants from the crowded areas of Punjab, especially Jullundur and Hoshiarpur and many of whom had served in the British Indian Army and had thus acquired the confidence and the means necessary for emigration. The hostile attitude of the local population including of the white labour unions, the increasingly restrictive immigration laws, helped by the active complicity of the Secretary of State for India-all pushed the Indian community to the realisation that they must organize themselves if they were to resist the blatant racial discrimination being imposed on them. For example, Tarak Nath Das, an Indian student who was one of the first leaders of the Indian community in North America and responsible for starting a paper called ‘Free Hindustan’ understood very well that while the British government encouraged Indian labourers to go to work to Fiji where they were needed by British players it discouraged their emigration to North America for they feared that they might get infected by the current ideas of liberty.

Early activities

The first stirrings of political activity among Indian immigrants became evident as early as 1907 when a Circulare-e-Azad (Circular of liberty) was brought out by Ramnath Puri, a political exile, in which he pleaded support to the Swadeshi movement. Tarak Nath Das started the Free Hindustan and G.D. Kumar brought out a Gurmukhi paper Swadesh Sevak advocating social reform and asking Indian troops to rise in revolt. By 1910, Das and Kumar had set up the United India House in Seattle in the USA and began lecturing every week to a group of Indian labourers. They also developed close links with the Khalsa Diwan Society which resulted in 1913 in a decision to send a deputation to meet the Colonial Secretary in London and the Viceroy and other officials in India. They failed to meet the Colonial Secretary, despite a wait of a mouth, but succeeded in securing an audience with the Viceroy and the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab. Their visit to Punjab became the occasion for a series of public meetings in different Punjab towns and enthusiastic support from the people and the press.

Meanwhile, in early 1913, Bhagwan Singh, a Sikh priest who had worked in Hong Kong and the Malay states, visited Vancouver in Canada and openly preached the violent overthrow of British rule. Such was the effect of his exhortations that he was externed from Canada after three months, but his ideas had fired the imagination of his audiences.

Towards organisation

Disappointed with the lack of response from the Indian and British governments, convinced that their inferior status in foreign lands was a consequence of their being citizens of an enslaved country, and aroused to nationalist consciousness and a feeling of solidarity by the consistent political agitation, the Indian community in North America felt the acute need for a central organisation and a leader. The leader they found was Lala Har Dayal, a political exile from India, who had come to the U.S. in 1911 and had been lecturing at Stanford University as well as to the various American groups of intellectuals, radicals and workers on the anarchist and syndicalist movements but had not shown much interest in the affairs of Indian immigrants. His attitude changed with the news of the bomb attack on the Viceroy in Delhi in December 1912 which convinced him that the revolutionary spirit was still alive. He assumed leadership of the immigrant Indian community and, in May 1913, the need for a central organisation was met with the setting of the Hindi Association in Portland, which later changed its name to Hindustan Gadar Party. Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna was elected the President, Lala Har Dayal the General Secretary and Pandit Kanshi Ram Maroli the Treasurer at the first meeting of the Association which was also attended by others including Bhai Parmanand and Harnam Singh ‘Tundilat’. A sum of $10,000 was collected on the spot and decisions were taken to set up headquarters by the name of Yugantar Ashram in San Francisco and start a weekly paper, the Gadar, for free circulation.

Strategy and action

The plans of political action outlined by Lala Har Dayal and accepted by the Hindi Association were based on the understanding that British rule could only by overthrown by armed revolt and that for this to happen it was necessary that Indian immigrants go to India in large numbers and carry this message to the masses and the soldiers of the Indian army. He also believed that the freedom available in America should be used to fight the British and not the Americans, for in any case Indians would never be accepted as equals abroad till they were free in their own land. Basing themselves on this understanding, the militant nationalists launched a vigorous propaganda campaign, touring factories and farms where Indian immigrants worked.

Launching of paper and its impact

The paper Gadar was launched on the first of November, 1913; the first issue was in Urdu followed a month later by the Gurmukhi version.

The format of the Gadar paper was designed to convey the message of nationalism in simple and bold terms. Its very name meant revolt, thereby leaving no doubts about its intentions. On its masthead was inscribed the caption: Angrezi Raj Ka Dushman or ‘An Enemy of British Rule’. Besides, the front page of each issue carried the ‘Angrezi Raj Ka Kacha Chittha’ or ‘An Expose of British Rule’, which consisted of 14 points enumerating the negative effects of British rule. This Chittha was in effect a summary of the entire nationalist critique of British rule on the issues of drain of wealth, high land revenue, low per capita income, recurrence of famines which killed millions of Indians, high expenditure on Army and low expenditure on health, the policy of divide and rule by pitting Hindus and Muslims against each other. The last two points of the Chittha also pointed to the way out by highlighting the small number of Englishmen present in India as compared to the crores of Indians and by suggesting that the time had come for another revolution since already fifty-six years had lapsed since the last one in 1857.

The Gadar was of course circulated widely among Indian immigrants in North America, but it soon reached immigrants in the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, Malay states, Singapore, Trinidad and the Honduras as well as Indian regiments stationed in many of these centres. It was sent to India as well. The response it generated among immigrant communities was tremendous, groups were formed to read it and discuss the issues it raised and contributions poured in. The most popular proved to be the poems that were published in the paper, which were soon put together in the form of a collection called Gadar Ki Goonj, and were recited and sung at gatherings of Indians. The poems were marked by a revolutionary spirit and a strongly secular tone, as the following lines show:-

No Pundits or Mullahs do we need

No Prayers or litanies we need recite

These will only scuttle our boat

Draw the Sword; ‘it is time to fight’.

The Gadar also exhorted the Punjabi to atone for his pro-British role in the Revolt of 1857 by playing a leading part in throwing off the British yoke and it changed his self-image from that of a loyal soldier, an image that had been assiduously cultivated by the British, to that of a rebel whose only aim was freedom. The message of Gadar went home so rapidly that Har Dayal himself was surprised at the intensity of the response and the impatience of those who had been aroused into action.

Gadar movement: the main events

The subsequent course of the Gadar Movement was, however, determined by three major events in 1914; the arrests, jumping of bail and flight to Switzerland of Lala Har Dayal, the fateful voyage of the ship Komagata Maru, and the beginning of the First World War.

(i)    In March, 1914 Har Dayal was arrested. The most likely reason was the pressure exerted by the British government who for obvious reasons would like to see him removed from the leadership of the Gadar Movement, but the stated reason was his anarchist activities. He was released on bail and it was decided that he jump bail and go to Switzerland.

(ii)   Meanwhile, in an attempt to defy Canadian immigration laws which forbade entry to all except those who made a “direct passage in their own ship.” Gurdit Singh, an Indian contractor living in Singapore chartered a ship, the Komagata Maru, and, with 376 Indian passengers originating from various places in East and South East Asia, set sail for Vancouver. On the way, Gadar party mobilisers visited the ship, gave lectures and distributed literature. Receiving prior intimation of the intended immigration, the Press in Vancouver warned of the ‘Mounting Oriental Invasion’ and the Canadian government prepared to meet the challenge by tightening its laws.

On arrival, the ship was not allowed into the port and was cordoned off by the police. Despite the strenuous efforts of the “Shore Committee” in Vancouver led by Husain Rahim, Sohan Lal Pathak and Balwant Singh and a powerful campaign in the USA led by Barkatullah, Bhagwan Singh, Ram Chandra and Sohan Singh Bhakna, the Komagata Maru was forced out of Canadian waters. Before it reached Japan, the First World War broke out and the British government ordered that no passenger was to be allowed to leave the ship till it reached Calcutta.

Its return journey triggered off a wave of resentment at every port of call among the communities of immigrant Indians and heightened anti-British feelings. When the ship reached Budge near Calcutta, the hostile attitude of the police led to a clash which resulted in the death of 18 passengers. 202 were arrested and the rest succeeded in running away.

iii)        The third and most important event that brought about a dramatic change in the situation was the outbreak of the First World War. This was the opportunity that the Gadarites had been waiting for to seize and to make the best of Britain’s difficulty. It came earlier than they had expected, and their preparations were still in a rudimentary stage. Nevertheless, a special meeting of the leading workers of the party met and decided that the time had come for action and that their biggest weakness, lack of arms, could be made good by persuading the Indian soldiers to revolt. The Gadar party accordingly issued its Ailan-e-Jung or ‘Proclamation of War’, which was circulated among Indians living abroad. Gadar activists also embarked on tours exhorting people to return to India and organize a revolt. The response was tremendous, with large numbers offering themselves and their entire belongings to the cause of the nation. Encouraged by this the Gadar party began the exodus to India, and batches of revolutionaries began to arrive in India by different routes in the latter half of 1914.

The movement in the last phase

The Government of India was laying in wait, armed with the new Ingress into India Ordinance. Returning immigrants were carefully scrutinised, and of an estimated 8,000 who returned, 5,000 who were considered ‘safe’ were allowed to go unhindered. Of the remaining, some were interned in their villages, others detained. Nevertheless, many hardcore activists succeeded in reaching Punjab.

Kartar Singh Sarabha, the young and brilliant Indian student who had jointed the Gadar Movement in the USA and played a prominent role in the production of the Gadar paper, had been among the first to reach Punjab safely and he set about the task of organising and contacting the returning emigrants, holding meetings and formulating a plan of action. Gadar activists toured the villages, cyclostyled and distributed party publications, addressed gatherings at melas and made every effort to persuade the people to rise in revolt. But the Punjab in 1914 was very different from what they had expected and the people were in no mood to embark upon the romantic Gadar adventure. They had also to contend with the active hostility of loyalist elements such as the Chief Khalsa Diwan who declared them to be apostates or fallen Sikhs and criminals and cooperated fully in the government’s efforts to crush them.

Disappointed with the popular response, the Gadar revolutionaries next attempted to spread their message among the soldiers and engineer a mutiny. Attempts at revolt in November 1914 failed for lack of proper organisation and centralised leadership. Another, more organised, attempt was made in February 1915 after Rash Behari Bose had been contacted and entrusted the task of leadership and organisation, but this too proved abortive as the government succeeded in penetrating the organisation and taking pre-emptive measures. Bose managed to escape, but most of the other leaders were arrested and the Gadar movement effectively crushed.

The repression

The repression that followed was the heaviest possible: 42 were sentenced to death and 200 to long prison terms. As a consequence, an entire generation of the nationalist leadership of Punjab was politically beheaded. Efforts by Indian revolutionaries in Berlin to use German help and organize mutinies among Indian troops stationed abroad and by Raja Mahendra Pratap and Barkatullah to enlist the aid of the Amir of Afghanistan proved equally abortive. Violent rebellion to overthrow British rule was not fated to have much success.

Failure and achievements

Should, we therefore, term the Gadar movement a failure? Can we say that because they did not succeed in their immediate stated objective of organising an armed revolution driving the British out, their efforts were in vain? By that token, all the major national struggles of 1920-22, 1930-34 or 1942 would have to be termed as failures, since none of them succeeded in immediately winning independence. But if the yardstick of success is whether there was a furthering of nationalist feeling, creation of traditions of resistance, emergence and trial of new methods of struggle, the spread of forward-looking ideologies of secularism, democracy and egalitarianism, then the Gadar movement occupies a very important place in India’s struggle for freedom.

Achievements: The Gadarites succeeded in popularising nationalist ideology, especially the critique of colonialism and the understanding that Indian poverty and backwardness was a consequence of British rule among vast masses of Indians in India and abroad. They created a cadre of highly motivated nationalists and though many of these were lost through repression, some permanently and others for number of years continued to play an important role in building up the national movementand later the left and peasant movements in Punjab and other parts of India for many decades to follow.

Gadar ideology was also strongly egalitarian and democratic in content. Their aim was to set up an independent republic in India. Har Dayal, deeply influenced as he was by the anarchist-syndicalist movements[1], also imparted to the movement an egalitarian outlook. His constant references to the Irish, Mexican, and Russian revolutionaries also helped in saving the movement from a chauvinist nationalism and in giving it an inter-nationalist character.

But perhaps the most important achievement of the Gadarites was that despite the fact that the vast majority of their followers were recruited from amongst Punjabi Sikh immigrants, they never betrayed any communal tendencies and were, on the contrary, strongly secular in their outlook. Concern with religion was seen as petty and narrow-minded, and unworthy of revolutionaries.

They freely accepted non-Sikhs and non-Punjabis as leaders: Har Dayal was a Hindu, Barkatullah a Muslim, Rash Behari Bose a Hindu and Bengali. They revered leaders from all over India-Tilak, Savarkar, Khudi Ram Bose and Aurobindo Ghosh were their heroes. They also understood that the ideology of the Sikhs being a ‘martial race’ was a creation of the colonial rulers and was meant to preserve them as loyal soldiers and they tried their best to counter it. They popularised the nationalist salute Bande Mantaram as the rallying cry of the movement and not any religious greeting such as Sat Sri Akal. In the words of Sohan Singh Bhakna, the Gadari Baba who later became a major nationalist and left leader, “we were not Sikhs or Punjabis, our religion was patriotism.”

Weakness: The Gadar movement inevitably had its share of weaknesses as well, the chief of which was its over-estimation of the level of readiness of the movement. One might say that they sounded the bugles of war without stopping to examine the state of their own army. The response that they evoked in the immigrant Indian community, whose nationalist consciousness was aroused by daily experiences of racial insult, alienation produced by living in unfamiliar surroundings, and whose small numbers made that task of its organisation relatively easier, misled them into thinking that vast mass of Indians in India were also in a similar state of readiness.

They also underestimated the might of the British rulers, the strength of the ideological foundations of their rule, and thought that all that the people of India needed was a call to revolt. The cost that had to be paid for this crucial weakness not only by the Gadar movement but by the entire national movement was heavy indeed, for it is not unlikely that if the major part of the Gadar leadership had not been removed from the scene, the political complexion of the national movement, certainly in Punjab, would have been very different indeed as the Gadarites with their committed nationalist and secular ideology would inevitably have played a critical role in checking the communal tendencies that were to raise their head in later years.

Revolutionary terrorism during the 1920s

Why Attraction for Revolutionary Terrorism after Non-Cooperation Movement?-The revolutionaries had faced severe repression during the First World War. But in early 1920, many were released by the Government under a general amnesty to create a harmonious environment for the Montford Reforms to work. Soon, Gandhi launched the Non-Cooperation Movement. Under the persuasion of Gandhi and C.R. Das, many terrorist groups either agreed to join the non-cooperation programme or suspended their activities to give the non-violent Non-Cooperation Movement a chance.

But the sudden withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation Movement left many of them disillusioned; they began  to question the basic strategy of nationalist leadership and its emphasis on non-violence and began to look for alternatives. But since these younger nationalists were not attracted to the parliamentary work of the Swarajists or to the patient, undramatic, constructive work of the No-changers, they were drawn to the idea that violent methods alone would free India. Thus, revolutionary terrorism was revived.

Nearly all major leaders of revolutionary terrorist policies had been enthusiastic participants in the Non-Cooperation Movement and included Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, Surya Sen, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Chandrasekhar Azad, Shiv Verma, Bhagwaticharan Vohra, Jaidev Kapur and Jatin Das. Two separate strands of revolutionary terrorist groups emerged during this period-one operating in Punjab-UP-Bihar and the other in Bengal.

Major influences

1.    Upsurge of working class trade unionism after the War; the revolutionaries wanted to harness the revolutionary potential of the new emergent class for nationalist revolution.

2.   Russian Revolution (1917) and the success of the young Soviet state in consolidating itself.

3.   Newly sprouting communist groups with their emphasis on Marxism, socialism and the proletariat.

4.   Journals publishing memoris and articles extolling the self-sacrifice of revolutionaries, such as Atmasakti, Sarathi and Bijoli.

5.   Novels and books such as Bandi Jiwan by Sachin Sanyal and Pather Dabi by Sharatchandra Chatterjee (a Government ban only enhanced its popularity).

In Punjab-UP-Bihar the revolutionary terrorist activity in was dominated by the Hindustan Republican Association/Army or Hindustan Republic Association (later renamed Hindustan Socialist Republication Association or HSRA). The HRA was founded in October 1924 in Kanpur by Ramprasad Bismil, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee and Sachin Sanyal, with an aim to organize an armed revolution to overthrow the colonial government and establish in its place a Federal Republic of United States of India whose basic principle would be adult franchise.

Kakori Robbery (August 1925) - The most important “action” of the HRA was the Kakori robbery. The men held up the 8-Down train at Kakori, an obscure village near Lucknow, and looted its official railway cash. Government crackdown after the Kakori robbery led to arrests of many, of whom 17 were jailed, four transported for life and four-Bismil, Ashfaqullah, Roshan Singh and Rajendra lahiri-were hanged. Kakori proved to be a setback.

The HSRA was determined to overcome the Kakori setback. The younger revolutionaries, inspired by socialist ideas, set out to reorganise Hindustan Republic Association at a historic meeting in the ruins of Ferozshah Kotla in Delhi (September 1928). The participants included Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Bhagwaticharan Vohra from Punjab and Bejoy Kumar Sinha, Shiv Verma and Jiadev Kapur from UP. The HSRA decided to work under a collective leadership and adopted socialism as its official goal.

Saunders’ Murder (Lahore, December 1928) - Just when the HSRA revolutionaries had begun to move away from individual heroic action and terrorism, the death of Sher-i-Punjab Lala Lajpat Rai due to lathi blows received during a lathicharge on an anti-Simon Commission procession (October 1928) led them once again to take to individual assassination. Bhagat Singh, Azad and Rajguru shot dead Saunders, the police official responsible for the lathicharge in Lahore. The assassination was justified in these words: “The murder of a leader respected by millions of people at the unworthy hands of an ordinary police officer....was an insult to the nation. It was the bounden duty of young men of India to efface it...we regret to have had to kill a person but he was part and parcel of that inhuman and unjust order which has to be destroyed.”

Bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly (April 1929) - The HSRA leadership now decided to let the people know about its changed objectives and the need for a revolution by the masses. Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt were asked to throw a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly on April 8, 1929 against the passage of the Public Safety Bill and Trade Disputes Bill aimed at curtailing civil liberties of citizens in general and workers in particular. The bombs had been deliberately made harmless and were aimed at making the deaf hear. The objective was to get arrested and to use the trial court as a forum for propaganda so that people would become familiar with their movement and ideology.

Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were tried in the Lahore conspiracy case. Many other revolutionaries were tried in a series of other cases. In jail, these revolutionaries protested against the horrible conditions through a fast, and demanded honourable and decent treatment as political prisoners. Jatin Das became the first martyr on the 64th day of his fast. Defence of these young revolutionaries was organised by Congress leaders. Bhagat Singh became a household name.

Azad was involved in a bid to blow up Viceroy Irwin’s train near Delhi in December 1929. During 1930 there were a series of terrorist actions in Punjab and UP towns (26 incidents in 1930 in Punjab alone).

Azad was killed in a police encounter in a park in Allahabad in February 1931. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were hanged on March 23, 1931.

In Bengal during the 1920s many revolutionary groups reorganized their underground activities. While many continued working under the Congress, thus getting access to the masses and providing an organisational base to the Congress to towns and villages, many cooperated with C.R. Das in his Swarajist work. After Das’s death in 1925, the Bengal Congress broke up into two factions-one led by J.M. Sengupta (Anushilan group joined forces with him) and the other led by Subhash Bose (Yugantar group backed him).

The actions of the reorganised groups included an assassination attempt on the notorious Calcutta Police Commissioner, Charles Tegart (another man named Day got killed) by Gopinath Saha in 1924. The Government, armed with a new ordinance, came down heavily on revolutionaries. Many including Subhash Bose were arrested. Gopinath Saha was hanged.

Because of government repression and factionalism among the revolutionaries, revolutionary activity suffered a setback, but soon many of them started regrouping. Among the new “Revolt Groups”, the most active and famous was the Chittagong group under Surya Sen.

Chittagong Armoury Raid (April 1930) - Surya Sen had participated in the Non-Cooperation Movement and had become a teacher in the national school in Chittagong. He was imprisoned from 1926 to 1928 for revolutionary activity and afterwards continued working in the Congress. He was the secretary of the Chittagong District Congress Committee. He used to say “Humanism is a special virtue of a revolutionary.” He was a lover of poetry and an admirer of Tagore and Qazi Nazrul Islam.

Surya Sen decided to organize an armed rebellion along with his associates-Anant Singh, Ganesh Ghosh and Lokenath Baul to show that it was possible to challenge the armed might of the mighty British Empire. They had planned to occupy two main armouries in Chittagong to seize and supply arms to the revolutionaries to destroy telephone and telegraph lines and to dislocate the railway link of Chittagong with the rest of Bengal. The raid was conducted in April 1930 and involved 65 activists under the banner of Indian Republican Army-Chittagong Branch. The raid was quite successful; Sen hoisted the national flag, took salute and proclaimed a provisional revolutionary government. Later, they dispersed into neighbouring villages and raided government targets.

Surya Sen was arrested in February 1933 and hanged in January 1934, but the Chittagong raid fired the imagination of the revolutionary-minded youth and recruits poured into the revolutionary terrorist groups in a steady stream.

Official Reaction - there was panic at first and then severe government repression. Armed with 20 repressive Acts, the Government let loose the police on the revolutionaries. In Chittagong, several villages were burned and punitive fines imposed on many others. In 1933, Jawaharlal Nehru was arrested for sedition and given two years’ sentence because he had condemned imperialism and praised the heroism of the revolutionaries.

Ideological Rethinking - A real breakthrough was made by Bhagat Singh and his comrades in terms of revolutionary ideology, forms of revolutionary struggle and the goals of revolution. The rethinking had begun in the mid-1920s. The Founding Council of HRA had decided to preach revolutionary and communist principles, and the HRA Manifesto (1925) declared that the “HRA stood for abolition of all systems which made exploitation of man by man possible”. HRA’s main proposa was nationalisation of railways and other means of transport and of heavy industries such as ship building and steel. HRA had also decided to start labour and peasant organisations and work for an “organised and armed revolution”. During their last days (late 1920s), these revolutionaries had started moving away from individual heroic action and terrorism towards mass politics.

Bismil, during his last days, appealed to the youth to give up pistols and revolvers, not to work in revolutionary conspiracies and instead work in an open movement. He urged the youth to strengthen Hindu-Muslim unity, unite all political groups under the leadership of the Congress. Bismill affirmed faith in communism and the principle that “every human being has equal rights over the products of nature”.

The famous statement of the revolutionary position is contained in the book - The Philosophy of the Bomb written by Bhagwaticharan Vohra.

Even before his arrest, Bhagat Singh had moved away from belief in terrorism and individual heroic action to Marxism and the belief that a popular broad-based movement alone could lead to a successful revolution. In other words, revolution could only be “by the masses, for the masses”. That is why Bhagat Singh helped establish the Punjab Naujawan Bharat Sabha (1926) as an open wing of revolutionaries to carry out political work among the youth, peasants and workers, and it was to open branches in villages. Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev also organised the Lahore Students Union for open, legal work among students. Bhagat and his comrades also realised that a revolution meant organisation and development of a mass movement of the exploited and the suppressed sections by the revolutionary intelligentsia. Bhagat used to say, “...real revolutionary armies are in villages and factories.”

What then was the need for individual heroic action? Firstly, because of the rapidity of change in thinking, effective acquisition of new ideology is a prolonged and historical process.  Secondly, these young intellectuals faced the classic dilemma of how to mobilise people and recruit them. Here, they decided to opt for propaganda by deed, i.e., through individual heroic action and by using courts as a forum for revolutionary propaganda.

Redefining Revolution - Revolution was no longer equated with militancy and violence. Its objective was national liberation. Imperialism was to be overthrown but beyond that a new socialist order was to be achieved, ending “exploitation of man by man”. As Bhagat Singh said in the court, “Revolution does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife, nor is there a place in it for personal vendetta. It is not the cult of bomb and pistol. By revolution we mean the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change”.

Bhagat Singh fully accepted Marxism and the class change”. He said -”Peasants have to free themselves not only from the foreign yoke, but also from the yoke of landlords and capitalists.” He also said, “The struggle in India will continue, so long as a handful of exploiters continue to exploit labour of common people to further their own interests. It matters little whether these exploiters are British capitalists, British and Indian capitalists in alliance, or even purely Indians.” He defined socialism scientifically as abolition of capitalism and class domination.

Bhagat was fully and consciously secular-two of the six rules drafted by Bhagat for the Punjab Naujawan Bharat Sabha were that its members would have nothing to do with communal bodies and that they would propagate a general feeling of tolerance among people, considering religion to be a matter of personal belief. Bhagat also saw the importance of freeing people from the mental bondage of religion and superstition-”to be a revolutionary, one required immense moral strength, but one also required criticism and independent thinking”.

Aspects of the New Phase of Terrorist Movement in Bengal

There was a large-scale participation of young women especially under Surya Sen. These women provided shelter, carried messages and fought with guns in hand. Prominent women revolutionaries in Bengal during this phase included Pritilata Waddedar, who died conducting a raid; Kalpana Dutt who was arrested and tried along with Surya Sen and given a life sentence; Santi Ghosh and Suniti Chandheri, school girls of Comilla, who shot dead the district magistrate. (December 1931); and Bina Das who fired point blank at the Governor while receiving her degree at the convocation (February 1932).

There was an emphasis on group action aimed at organs of the colonial state, instead of individual action. The objective was to set an example before the youth and to demoralise the bureaucracy.

Some of the earlier Hindu religiosity was shed, and there were no more rituals like oath-taking, and this facilitated participation by Muslims. Surya Sen had Muslims such as Satar, Mir Ahmed, Fakir Ahmed Mian and Tunu Mian in his group.

Some drawbacks

-      The movement retained some conservative elements.

-      It failed to evolve broader socio-economic goals.

-      Those working with Swarajists failed to support the cause of Muslim peasantry against zamindars in Bengal.