ON THE CENTENARY OF
THE GHADAR MOVEMENT
Powerful Inspiration
for the Creation of a Better India
Sitaram Yechury
THE year 2013 marks
the centenary of the Ghadar
movement. Like a blazing comet that sets the skies aflame,
the Ghadar movement
started on the USA's west coast on November 1, 1913, with
the beating of drums
that its name was 'mutiny' and that it was the 'enemy of the
British rule.’ It
openly declared that its policy was to start another Ghadar.
(The word means
rebellion and referred to the Great Uprising of 1857, the
First War of Indian
Independence.)
MOVEMENT
THAT PREDATED
OTHER
IMPORTANT MILESTONES
Consider the time when
the Ghadar movement began. It
was a year before the First World War began. It was four
years before the
triumph of the Russian Revolution. It was eight years before
Maulana Hasrat
Mohani and Swami Kumaranand, two communist leaders, moved
the resolution for
complete independence at the Ahmedabad AICC session in 1921,
which was not
accepted by Gandhiji. The slogan of poorna
swaraj was finally given by the AICC on December 31,
1929 at its Lahore
session. It was a
full sixteen years after the Ghadarites first raised the
slogan of independence.
The Ghadar movement
started towards the end of what is called ‘Britain’s
Imperial Century’ where
the ‘sun could never set.’ An
Indian
patriot, we are told, promptly retorted, “Yes, of course.
Even God does not
trust the British in the dark!”
The call for
independence, given by the Ghadar
movement, not only predates all other important milestones
in India’s
struggle
for freedom but it also in a sense anticipates many of the
hallmarks
associated with the freedom struggle. The Gandhian
non-cooperation satyagraha,
as we shall see, was one of the strategies of struggle for
independence that
the Ghadarites adopted. This movement was a source of
inspiration for Bhagat
Singh who reportedly always carried the photograph of Kartar
Singh Sarabha in
his pocket. The methods that Subhash Chandra Bose’s INA
adopted were also
influenced by the Ghadar movement.
The Indian emigrants
in the USA
and Canada,
thus, formed the earliest organisation – amongst the many
streams of our
freedom struggle – not on Indian soil, but abroad. Given the
conditions of
miserable existence in British India, many people migrated
to various parts of
the world, particularly to East Asia, i.e., Malaya,
Philippines,
Hong Kong,
Japan,
etc. Since the conditions in these countries were not very
encouraging either,
they turned towards Canada
and to the United States,
which were then experiencing an economic boom. These
emigrants, however, had to
experience abject racial discrimination and were treated
with contempt. This
was distinct from the treatment that these two countries
accorded to the
Chinese or the Japanese. These emigrants, mainly from the
Punjab, came to the
natural conclusion that it was India's
colonial
slavery which was the root cause for such discrimination
against and
racial exploitation of the Indians. The struggle against
injustices meted out
to them thus naturally coalesced with the quest for India's
freedom. Apart from the
emigrants, other revolutionaries who left India
to live in exile and those
who went for higher studies also joined such struggles.
Among them was Lala
Hardayal who rose to become a prominent Ghadarite. Along
with stalwarts like
Sohan Singh Bhakna, the Ghadar movement adopted an anthem, Ghadar
di Goonj, which
said 'Nawan roop rachan Hind de samaj da, Tukham udaona
zalaman de raj da' (destroy
the roots of the tyrants rule, in order to construct a new
social and political
order in India).
Though bulk of those
who joined the movement were from
Punjab, there were others like Pandurang Khankhoje and
Vishnu Ganesh Pingle
from Maharashtra and Darsi
Chenchaiah from
Andhra Pradesh, etc.
DIRECT
CONTRIBUTOR TO
ACHIEVEMENT
OF
FREEDOM
Soon after its
formation, the Ghadar movement started
its own paper, Ghadar, with Lala Hardayal as its
founding editor. On top
of the paper's masthead was printed its identity: Angrezi
raj ka dushman
(enemy of the British rule). At the bottom of the front page
of its every
issue, ran its stated objective: “56 years have elapsed
since the Mutiny of
1857; now there is an urgent need of a second one.” Thus
emerged onto the
theatre of the Indian people’s glorious saga of struggles
for freedom a band of
deeply secular emigrants who were to first inspire and
directly contribute to
the achievement of our freedom.
Naturally, the
Canadian and the US
authorities
further tightened the immigration laws in view of these
developments. In order
to block further entry of Indians, the authorities imposed
various harsh
restrictions, like showing two hundred dollars before entry;
denied the
facility to bring their spouses and children; prohibiting
ships carrying
Indians to provide food or water to them; etc. Such
obnoxious racist treatment
was meant mainly for the Indians. Far from deterring the
Ghadarites, however, these
steps only deepened their resolve to struggle for India's
independence further.
Canada stipulated that
Indians could be allowed only in
ships that are directly bound to Canada,
an impossible stipulation to meet at that time when there
was no direct ship
service from Canada
to India.
As late Comrade
Harkishan Singh Surjeet noted, “…..the
Indian community in Vancouver
came forward to meet this challenge. One Gurudit Singh, who
hailed from Amritsar,
chartered a Japanese vessel named Komagatamaru,
issued tickets and took in passengers to be taken to Canada.
On April 4, 1914, the ship
sailed from Hong Kong and reached Vancouver
on May 23, with 351 Sikhs and 21 Punjabi Muslims aboard. But
they were not
allowed to land. Having stayed in the waters near the port
for eight weeks, the
ship finally started its return journey on July 23. But when
the hapless
passengers arrived at Budge Budge port near Calcutta
on September 27, they were greeted
with bullets, which claimed 18 lives, according to the
government, and injured
many. A number of passengers were arrested while 29,
including Gurudit Singh,
were reported missing.
“Finally, in the
beginning of 1915, heroes of the
Ghadar Party started to leave Canada
and the USA
and came to India
in batches, via Shanghai
and Singapore.
Their aim was to spread discontent in various cantonments
and motivate the
Indian soldiers for revolt against the British. Leaders and
cadres from other
revolutionary organisations like the Anushilan Samiti also
extended their cooperation
in this endeavour. The earlier fixed date for the uprising
was February 21,
1915, but it was preponed to February 19 when a traitor gave
out the news to
the CID. Still, however, the plan did not succeed and the
leaders were hauled
up before they could do something.”
SPIRIT
REMAINS ALIVE,
INSPIRES
GENERATIONS
Then followed a series
of conspiracy cases fabricated
by the British. There was a main Lahore
conspiracy
case, and then there were four supplementary conspiracy
cases, two Mandi
conspiracy cases, two Burma
conspiracy cases, and those conducted in Singapore
and some other places outside India.
As a result of this shameless mockery of justice which is
what the colonial
British judicial process represented, 46 Ghadar patriots
were hanged to death
and 64 sentenced to life transportation to the notorious Kala
Paani in
the Andamans. Hundreds more were sentenced to various
degrees of punishment.
Much before the
Mahatma entered the scene to lead the
freedom struggle and gave the call for non-cooperation
satyagraha, the
Ghadarites had come to the simple conclusion that if the
then 300 million
Indians had refused to cooperate with the British, the
British would never have
been able to stay in India. Their slogan was, 'pindaan
walion maamla bandh
kar deo' (village folks stop paying land revenue to
the government).
Inside India,
the legacy of the Ghadar movement picked up momentum after
Mahatma Gandhi
withdrew the 1921 non-cooperation movement following the
people’s attack on a police
station in Chauri Chaura, Uttar Pradesh, calling it a
“Himalayan blunder.” A
large number of youth strongly disapproved of this action.
Among them was
Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote from jail to this affect.
Significantly, among such
youth was Bhagat Singh as well. He was strongly influenced
by the idealism of
the Ghadar movement, particularly its steadfast commitment
to secularism at a
time when communal violence was rampant in the post-Gandhian
withdrawal of the
non-cooperation movement. As historian Harish Puri notes,
“.….the sheer
audacity of the Ghadar patriots and the tremendous
sacrifices they made left
the young man (Bhagat Singh) awestruck. Kartar Singh Sarabha
became his hero
and a role model. As he wrote about Sarabha later: 'one is
amazed to think of
what he at the age of 19 was able to do….. Such courage!
Such self-confidence!
So much of self-denial and passionate commitment has been
rarely seen earlier.....
Ohnan di rag rag vich inquilabi jazba samaya hoya si (revolutionary
passion
was embedded in every vein of his)’.” In a sense, this
explains Bhagat
Singh's own personal attributes in the next decade or so:
he, at the age of 23,
refused mercy from the authorities and with a smile went to
the gallows on
March 23, 1931, with his example continuing to inspire all
the future
generations of patriotic youth down to this day.
Bhagat Singh's
exchanges with prominent Ghadarites who
were released from the Andamans --- Bhai Paramanand,
Sachindra Nath Sanyal, Ramsaran
Das and others --- led, among other things, to the
establishment of the Naujawan
Bharat Sabha in 1924 and of the Hindustan Socialist
Republican Army in 1928.
GREAT
REVOLUTION SHOWS
THE WAY
OF INDEPENDENCE
Simultaneously during
this period, soon after the 1915
Ghadar uprising failed, an event occurred that changed the
whole history of the
world --- it was the triumph of the Russian Revolution in
1917. Comrade Lenin's
and socialist Russia's wholehearted support to the
independence of colonial
countries attracted the Ghadar heroes and two of them ---
Bhai Santokh Singh
and Ratan Singh --- went as a delegate and an observer,
respectively, to
attend the fourth congress of the Communist
International. Having seen the success of the worker-peasant
alliance in bringing
about the Russian Revolution, the need to organise the
Indian peasantry and
working class became an absolutely necessary objective. Bhai
Santokh Singh
returned to India
with the objective of strengthening the revolutionary
consciousness of the
people and hence he started the journal Kirti (Labour)
in February 1926,
both in Punjabi and Urdu, and actively plunged into the
kisan movement. Bhagat
Singh also worked on the editorial staff of Kirti
for a few months, as
he clearly held the Ghadar movement as the first genuinely
revolutionary
struggle for the freedom of India.
Bhagat Singh edited the journal as a continuation of the
revolutionary struggle
in a new way, i.e., for a revolutionary change through
political education and
the mobilisation of the peasants and workers.
With the active
support of Lenin and socialist Russia, many young
revolutionaries were sent to
study at the University of the Toilers of the East,
established by the Russian
Revolution in Moscow.
The last batch of such students returned in 1936 and plunged
directly into the
revolutionary struggles. Many of the Ghadarites like Bhai
Santokh Singh, Jawala
Singh, Ratan Singh, Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, Karam Singh
Cheema and others ---
today affectionately called Ghadari babas --- played a
significant role in the
formation of the All India Kisan Sabha in 1936.
The Ghadar movement
thus influenced other important
streams that contributed to India's
freedom. The organisation of the Indian National Army (INA)
by Subhash Chandra
Bose was almost a reiteration of the Ghadar methodology of
the liberation of India through
an armed attack. Ras Behari Bose, one of the leaders of the
planned Ghadar
uprising in 1915, who was living in exile in Japan
since then, was one of the chief sources of support in
raising the INA in Japan. The
legacy of the Ghadar movement, hence, became an important
element of
inspiration for all streams of India's
struggle
for independence including the RIN mutiny of 1946.
Harish Puri says the
Ghadar movement “was the first
openly declared political struggle for complete independence
of India.
Beginning
with moral outrage against the British, the end to the
British rule in India through
an armed insurrection became its objective. The movement was
inspired by the
dominant ideological thinking among the young revolutionary
Indians living
abroad during the period 1905-1920. It gave birth to dreams
of freedom, of
founding in India
a secular, democratic republic and creating a new social
order based on social
good. It is believed since the Ghadar movement originated
outside India,
“it
could never present itself as an indigenous movement. That
may well be part of
the reason for the less attention given to its role in India's
freedom
struggle.”
The observances of the
Ghadar movement's centenary
must be an occasion for us to undo this grave historical
wrong and injustice of
not giving this movement and its heroes their legitimate due
in not merely the
achievement of India's freedom and independence but also in
shaping the
ideological consciousness and in moulding the youth down the
generations for
carrying forward the struggles for justice, freedom and
liberty in a most
comprehensive manner. Their contribution continues to remain
an inspiration to
the current struggles in India
that are aimed to create a better India
for the vast mass of its
people.
People's Democracy