The Ghadar Movement

The visit to Vancouver in early 1913 of Bhagwan Singh, a Sikh priest who had worked in Hong Kong and the Malay States, gave the revolutionary movement its first boost. He openly preached the gospel of violent overthrow of British rule, urging people to adopt the revolutionary salute Bande Mataram. After a three-month stay in Canada, Bhagwan Singh was expelled. The focus of revolutionary activity quickly shifted to the United States, which offered a relatively free political environment. 

 

•    He is Indian political exile, played the pivotal role. He arrived in California in April 1911, briefly taught at Stanford University, and quickly became involved in politics.

 

•    During the summer of 1912, he focused on giving lectures to various American groups of intellectuals, radicals, and workers about the anarchist and syndicalist movements, and he showed little interest in the issues that were agitating the immigrant Indian community. 

 

•    However, the bombing of Viceroy of India Lord Hardinge in Delhi on December 23, 1912, sparked his imagination and reawakened the dormant Indian revolutionary in him. 

 

•    His belief in the possibility of a revolutionary overthrow of the British regime in India was reawakened, and he issued a Yugantar Circular applauding the Viceroy's assassination. 

 

•    Meanwhile, Indians on the West Coast of the United States were looking for a leader and had considered inviting Ajit Singh, who had become famous during the Punjab agitation of 1907. But Har Dayal was already there, and after December 1912, he demonstrated his willingness to participate actively in politics. In May 1913, the Portland Hindi Association was formed.

 

•    Bhai Parmanand, Sohan Singh Bhakna, and Harnam Singh ‘Tundilat' were among those who attended the Association's first meeting, which was held in Kanshi Ram's home. ‘Do not fight the Americans; use the freedom available in the US to fight the British; you will never be treated as equals by the Americans until you are free in your own land; the root cause of Indian poverty and degradation is British rule, and it must be overthrown, not by petitions, but by aimed revolt; carry this message to the masses and to Har Dayal's ideas were well-received right away.

 

•    A Working Committee was formed, and the decision was made to start a free weekly paper, The Ghadar, and to establish a headquarters in San Francisco called Yugantar Ashram. A series of meetings in various towns and cities followed, culminating in a meeting of representatives in Astoria, which confirmed and approved the decisions of the first meeting in Portland. The Ghadar Uprising had started.

 

•    The Ghadar militants launched an aggressive propaganda campaign right away, touring mills and farms where the majority of the Punjabi immigrant labourers worked. These political activists made the Yugantar Ashram their home, headquarters, and refuge.

 

•    The first issue of Ghadar was published in Urdu on November 1, 1913, followed by the Grumukhi edition on December 9. The title of the paper made it clear what it was about. 

 

•    Ghadar is a word that means "revolt." If there were any doubts, the masthead captions would clear them up.

 

•    ‘Angrezi Raj ka Dushman' or ‘An Enemy of British Rule.' Angrezi Raj Ka Kacha Chittha, or "An Expose of British Rule," appeared on the front page of each issue. 

 

•    The destruction of Indian arts and industries, the recurrence of famines and plagues that killed millions of Indians, and the use of Indian slaves were all included in this Chittha.

 

•    The policy of assisting Christian missionaries with funds raised from Hindus and Muslims, as well as the attempt to sow discord between Hindus and Muslims: in short, the entire critique of British rule formulated by the Indian national movement was summarised and presented to Ghadar readers every week.

 

1.    The Indian states have a population of seven crores, while British India has a population of 24 crores, with only 79,614 officers and soldiers and 38,948 volunteers.

 

2.    Fifty-six years have passed since the 1857 Revolt; a new one is now urgently needed.

 

•    The message was also conveyed by serialising Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence —1857, in addition to the Chittha's powerful simplicity. 

 

•    The Ghadar also included mentions of Lokamanya Tilak, Sri Aurobindo, V.D. Savarkar, Madame Cama, Shyamji Krishna Varma, Ajit Singh, and Sufi Amba Prasad's contributions, as well as highlights of the Anushilan Samiti, the Yugantar group, and Russian secret societies' daring deeds. 

 

•    The poems that appeared in The Ghadar, which were soon collected and published as Ghadar di Goonj and distributed free of charge, had perhaps the most powerful impact. As the following excerpt demonstrates, these poems were distinguished by their secular tone as well as their revolutionary zeal.

 

•    The Ghadar was widely distributed among Indians in North America, and it reached groups in the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, the Malay States, Singapore, Trinidad, Honduras, and, of course, India within a few months.

 

•    It elicited an unprecedented response, sparking heated debate and discussion. The poems it carried were recited at Punjabi immigrant gatherings and quickly became popular all over the world.

 

•    Surprisingly, The Ghadár succeeded in transforming the Punjabi immigrant's self-image from that of a loyal soldier of the British Raj to that of a rebel whose sole goal was to destroy the British hold on his motherland in a very short period of time. The Ghadar consciously brought the Punjabi's loyalist past to his attention, made him ashamed of it, and challenged him to atone for it in the name of his earlier tradition of resistance to oppression.

 

•    The message reached its intended audience, and ardent young militants began to yearn for ‘action.' Har Dayal was taken aback by the ferocity of the response.

 

•    On March 25, 1914, Dayal was arrested on the ostensible grounds of his anarchist activities, though everyone suspected the British government had a hand in it. He took advantage of his release on bail to flee the country. His active involvement with the Ghadar Movement came to an end with that.

 

•    Meanwhile, in March 1914, the ship Komagata Maru set sail for Canada on its fateful journey. For a long time, Canada had placed severe restrictions on Indian immigration, enacting a law that barred all but those who made a continuous journey from India from entering. Because there were no shipping lines that offered such a route, this measure was successful. 

 

•    The Canadian Supreme Court, however, allowed thirty-five Indians who had not made a continuous journey entry in November 1913. Encouraged by this decision, Gurdit Singh, an Indian contractor based in Singapore, decided to charter a ship and transport Indians from all over East and Southeast Asia to Vancouver. 

 

•    The ship set sail for Vancouver with a total of 376 Indian passengers on board. Ghadar activists gave lectures and distributed literature on board the ship in Yokohama, Japan. If the Indians were not allowed entry into Canada, the Punjabi press warned of dire consequences.  

 

•    The Canadian press, on the other hand, took a different stance, and some newspapers in Vancouver issued warnings about the "Mounting Oriental Invasion." Meanwhile, the Canadian government had closed the legal loopholes that had led to the Supreme Court's decision in November. The battle lines had been drawn in the sand. 

 

•    The ship was not allowed into the port and was cordoned off by police when it arrived in Vancouver. A 'Shore Committee' was formed under the leadership of Husain Rahim, Sohan Lal Pathak, and Balwant Singh to fight for the passengers' rights. Funds were raised, and protest meetings were held.

 

•    In India, a revolt against the British was threatening. A powerful campaign was organised in the United States under the leadership of Bhagwan Singh, Barkatullah, Ram Chandra, and Sohan Singh Bhakna, and the people were advised to prepare for rebellion. 

 

•    The Komagata Maru was forced to leave Canadian waters soon after. World War I broke out before the ship arrived in Yokohama, and the British government issued orders that no passenger be allowed to disembark anywhere along the way — not even at the ports where they had boarded the ship — but only at Calcutta. 

 

•    The ship sparked a wave of resentment and anger among the Indian community in every port it visited, and it became a focal point for anti-British mobilisation. When the plane landed in Budge Budge, near Calcutta, the harassed and enraged passengers, angered by the authorities' hostile attitude, resisted the police, resulting in an altercation in which eighteen passengers were killed and 202 arrested. A few of them were able to flee.

 

•    After all, they had been told to take advantage of this opportunity. A special meeting of the Ghadar Movement's leading activists decided that the opportunity must be taken, that it was better to die than to do nothing at all, and that their major weakness, a lack of arms, could be overcome by travelling to India and gaining the support of Indian soldiers. 

 

•    The Ghadar Party issued the Ailan-e-Jung, or Proclamation of War, which was widely circulated. Mohammed Barkatullah, Ram Chandra, and Bhagwan Singh organised and spoke at a series of public meetings to encourage Indians to return to their homeland and organise an armed rebellion. Indians living in Japan, the Philippines, China, Hong Kong, the Malay States, Singapore, and Burma were sent to persuade them to return home and join the rebels. The more agitated Ghadar activists, such as Kartar Singh Sarabha, who was later hanged by the British in a conspiracy case, and Raghubar Dayal Gupta, left for India right away.