Ghadar

The freedom struggle's western front opened on the Pacific coast. Punjabi farmers, ex-soldiers, and students who had crossed to Canada and California found the Empire's colour bar waiting for them — barred from voting, barred from bringing families, met with riots — and drew the conclusion that men without a free country would be slaves everywhere. In 1913, at San Francisco, they founded the Ghadar Party — the word means mutiny — under Sohan Singh Bhakna, with the scholar Har Dayal as its pen. Its weekly paper announced its programme in its masthead: an armed rising to end British rule, and it shipped by the thousands to Indians on every continent.

In 1914 Gurdit Singh chartered the Komagata Maru to carry 376 would-be immigrants to Vancouver, forcing the Empire to show its hand: the ship lay in harbour for two months while the passengers starved, then was escorted out to sea by a warship. When it reached Budge Budge near Calcutta, police tried to entrain the passengers by force and shot some twenty dead on the dock. Then the World War began, and the Ghadarites saw their moment: thousands sailed home to Punjab to raise the regiments.

The rising, fixed for February 1915 with Rash Behari Bose coordinating cells inside the army, was betrayed by an informer days before the date. The Lahore conspiracy trials sent forty-six men to the gallows — among them Kartar Singh Sarabha, nineteen years old, whose photograph a schoolboy named Bhagat Singh would carry for the rest of his short life — and hundreds to the Andamans. Only Singapore's 5th Light Infantry actually rose. Ghadar failed utterly in arms, and yet for thirty years afterwards, wherever the Raj found a revolutionary cell, it found a Ghadar man.