Essays

II. HINDUSTAN GHADAR 1913-1918

The exact moment of Ghadar's birth is hard to pinpoint, in part because parallel mobilizations were underway, arising from dual processes of political ferment. The publication of Ghadar marked the place and moment where these fields intersected. In meetings from October to November 1913 a group of politically active immigrants including Sohan Singh Bhakna and Taraknath Das founded the Pacific Coast Hindi Association, coordinating branches throughout the Sikh farming community. They soon recruited Har Dayal to take charge of propaganda, as he had swiftly built up a reputation in the San Francisco area through his high-profile activities within the larger radical milieu.

Soon, outreach workers were moving through Indian settlements organizing, educating, and soliciting funds. They also set up armaments workshops and guerrilla training. But the top priority was perhaps the publication and distribution of the newspaper at the party's San Francisco headquarters, dubbed the Yugantar Ashram. Thus when the first issue of Ghadar came out on November 1, 1913, the name of the paper became popular name became popularly attached to the PCHA, by extension with the movement as a whole, and by even further extension, to the politically radicalized diaspora. Under Dayal's editorship, the circulation of Ghadar forged what was more or less a prototypical Anderson-style print community throughout the diaspora; without the paper, Ghadar did not exist. "Our name is identical with our work," declared Dayal in an early issue.¹

The voyage of the Komagata Maru from March to September 1914 was the next key politicizing moment , an opportunity which the Ghadar party astutely identified in deploying its literature and propaganda to guide rising unrest that stemmed from race/class-based colonial oppression. Gurdit Singh, a wealthy contractor in Singapore, had originally chartered the Japanese ship to bring several hundred Sikhs from Hong Kong to British Columbia. He had conceived the enterprise as a direct challenge to the continuous voyage statute, a law requiring immigrants to have arrived directly from their country of origin-- a near impossibility for Indians, since most trans-Pacific ships embarked from Japanese, Chinese or Filipino ports. In this case, since the passengers lacked the requisite $200 each upon arrival in Canada, they were prevented from disembarking at Vancouver. There followed a two-month standoff in the harbor, during which the angry passengers took over the ship and defended it from being boarded in occasional skirmishes. Nevertheless, as provisions grew short, they were finally forced to sail back to India.

World War I broke out in July; by August the Ghadar had issued its call to arms, catching the ship en route with its most frequently quoted headline: "WANTED: Fearless, courageous soldiers for spreading ghadar in India. Salary: death. Reward: martyrdom. Pension: freedom. Place: the field of India."² Recognizing the incident as an inflammatory rallying moment for all Indians on the west coast at the time, prominent Ghadarites including Bhagwan Singh and Mohammed Barakatullah set off bearing guns and literature to meet the disgruntled passengers in Japan, and encouraging them to revolt when they arrived back in India. But the British authorities, prewarned, were ready to meet the returnees. The ship docked in Calcutta only to face yet another police stand-off, which soon devolved into a shoot-out. Some twenty passengers and a few police were killed, and some two hundred more arrested. The rest disappeared or went underground, a few to resurface later in their villages. But close in the wake of the Komagata Maru came other ships bearing would-be rebels, propaganda and weaponry. Meanwhile back in San Francisco, mobilization continued as surveillance increased under British behest.

Yet as far as Ghadar is noticed at all within American history, it is usually reduced to the Hindu-German Conspiracy case. On the eve of war, the German government had become intrigued by the potential for weakening Britain through its vulnerable colonies. The goal was to create domestic unrest within Britain's most economically indispensible and geographically strategic possession, while also thereby keeping significant numbers of the Indian troops so prominent in the British army out of the European theater. Thus, in an attempt to harness the various international organizations working for Indian independence, the German foreign office recruited the most prominent Indian nationalists then active in Europe, as well as some dozen of those rather intriguing radical intellectuals from California to form the Berlin India Committee in 1914. Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, a.k.a. Chatto, formerly a member of the Paris circle and of the French Socialist Party, was the chairperson.

But the relationship between the BIC and Yugantar Ashram community was strained, racked by conflict of interest regarding jurisdiction and organizational goals. Despite the steep power differential between the Indians and the Germans, both were using one another temporarily to further their own ends. Strategically speaking, the Germans prioritized their Ottoman alliance and the Central Asian theater, and thus placed a far greater emphasis on pan-Islamist movements than the Californians might otherwise have sought out. Moreover, the oddness of a situation in which an imperial power found itself in the position of supporting an anti-imperialist movement was lost on no one. Nevertheless, for the moment Dayal could write in the Ghadar of November 15, 1913 that "the Germans have great sympathy with our movement for liberty, because they and ourselves have a common enemy (the English). In future Germany can draw assistance from us and they can render us great assistance also."

One scheme orchestrated by the German consulate in collusion with Yugantar Ashram was the 1915 affair of the ships Annie Larson and Maverick, which was to become pivotal for U.S. authorities in cracking the conspiracy case. It involved smuggling arms and ammunition from one ship out of San Francisco onto another off the coast of Mexico, and thence to Batavia in the Dutch Indies, chosen as a transmission point outside easy reach of British interception. There German agents would facilitate the pickup by a Bengali point man-- the young M.N. Roy, future father of Indian communism. But through a series of missed connections, the ships never managed their rendezvous. The mutineers already inside India waited in vain for the promised arms. When they didn't come, the Ghadarites decided they'd have to arm and fund themselves by dacoity (political banditry), raiding police stations, or co-opting military units.

Once in India-- at least for those not arrested immediately upon arrival-- the insurgents' two-fold priority from late 1914 to early 1915 was to establish contact with the Bengali revolutionists whose militant record they idealized, and to enlist support among the military in the northwest for open mutiny and guerrilla war in Punjab. In addition to a smattering of unrealized mutiny schemes, they also set about the somewhat incompatible tasks of gathering arms and funds, and procuring or manufacturing bombs, while also pursuing educational and political outreach among the peasantry. Some carried out sporadic assassinations of those identified as spies, informers, or traitors. Indeed at this time those targeted as individuals were more often than not Indians deemed to be collaborators or compradors, rather than British. The tactic of dacoity, although ostensibly based on the precept to "rob from the wealthy and show mercy to the poor," remained controversial. Other mutineers proselytized among the various army units; since the best source of reliable weaponry was in the possession of the military, there was a double need to forge alliances. So Ghadar was a something of a tactical as well as an ideological catchall. Its array of approaches drew upon its members' backgrounds in the tradition of peasant uprisings in Punjab, as well as the more recent tradition of guerrilla activity and dacoity in Bengal.

The day of the major uprising was scheduled for February 21, 1915. But due to the tightness of the British information regime, the plot was found out and put down, despite a last-minute shift of date. But despite British confidence that the movement had been crushed following a series of conspiracy trials in Lahore, in the course of which scores of Ghadar members were executed or imprisoned, other plans were still in the works, some instigated by Berlin, some by San Francisco. Between 1914 and 1916 agitators fanned out from California to incite mutiny among Britain's Indian troops in East Asia. Although one attempt at revolt by the 130th Baluchis at Rangoon in February 1915 was preemptively crushed, the all-Muslim 5th Light Infantry in Singapore revolted shortly afterward, apparently incited by propaganda from Ghadarites as well as from emissaries of the BIC-allied Turkish Khilafat. The mutiny was sustained for 3 days, during which those killed included 8 British officers. Thereafter, the British moved swiftly to "insulate" the other units against "revolutionary contamination."³ The Siam-Burma scheme in the fall of 1915 resulted in another disappointment. According to this plan the arms, money and personnel collected throughout Southeast Asia were to be assembled in Bangkok and thence taken over the mountains into Burma. But one of the conspirators was tricked into betraying the plot. The Ghadar operatives were captured, tortured and interrogated, and eventually transferred to a Calcutta jail.

Simultaneously, another plan was underway for a march from Istanbul across Iran to Kabul. There the Germans hoped to make an alliance with the Amir in order to establish a base in Afghanistan for military training of Indians for an armed invasion across the Northwest Frontier. But the Amir had already pledged his neutrality to the British. Nevertheless, within a few months of reaching Kabul in October 1915, the mission proclaimed itself an Indian provisional government in exile, with the quixotic Raja Mahendra Pratap as president and Ghadar founding member Barakatullah as his prime minister. Pratap's government sent elaborate messages of alliance to Indian princes, the king of Nepal and the Czar of Russia while soliciting a Turkish call for anti-British jihad among the frontier tribes. Thus, far from hewing to an ideological line, propaganda was tailored to target audiences ranging from opportunistic monarchs to religious warlords. Nevertheless, these communications too were intercepted before the scheme could be set in motion. By mid-1915 dissension was racking the core Ghadar group, largely on account of what some perceived as a betrayal of ideals in deference to German priorities. The original prominent figures were no longer in California. Instead they were either in Berlin, in India, or on missions throughout Central or Southeast Asia. A new batch of recruits was staffing Yugantar Ashram; founding member Gobind Behari Lal lamented that they were all pawns of the Germans. In particular, some of the faithful deemed Dayal's editorial successor Ram Chandra a sell-out and German sycophant, and indeed whenever he deviated editorially from a strictly pro-German and pro-Ottoman line, Berlin ordered him to cease and desist publication. Bhagwan Singh had returned from mobilizing in the Far East in October 1916 and promptly organized an anti-Ram Chandra faction with its own rival publication called the Yugantar, operative through the early months of 1917. In addition, many Ghadarites accused Ram Chandra as well as BIC liaison Chandra Chakrabarty of pocketing German funds for themselves. Building on such distrust, the constant pressure of surveillance took its toll as undercover agents deliberately stoked long-brewing tensions. Between 1914 and 1917 the California Indian community was internally disrupted by several murders targeting those suspected of being spies or informers. By the middle of 1916, both the British and German governments had received reports from their agents that the Ghadar party was crumbling.

There is some irony, given the weakness of the movement, that in 1917, after years of increasing pressure on U.S. authorities from the British government, the crackdown on Ghadar finally came. Now that the United States stood poised to enter the war against Germany, authorities eagerly found legal justification for their intervention in the Indians' political activities by accusing them of conspiracy to violate neutrality laws which forbade the launching of military expeditions from U.S soil against, or enlistment in a foreign army at war with, a nation with whom the U.S. was not in declared conflict. By the time the arrests were carried out in April, just before the official declaration of war on Germany, British agents had already processed and assembled most of the evidence, which they now held in readiness for a damning presentation. The luridly publicized Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial in San Francisco then stretched between November 1917 and April 1918. 36 of the 105 accused were Indian Ghadarites, who had polarized into two hostile camps with separate defense counsels, casting mutual recriminations back and forth. On the last day of the trial, a member of the Yugantar faction named Ram Singh killed Ram Chandra with a gun smuggled into the court room, only to be rapidly tackled and shot dead in turn by a U.S. marshal. After such drama, the verdict was almost anticlimactic: leaders Santokh Singh, Bhagwan Singh and Taraknath Das received eighteen to twenty-two month sentences, while the other defendants received less than a year each.

Why this shift in tolerance toward politically radical Indians? For a time, the United States had appeared as hospitable a place as any for an emigrant revolutionist. Indian political exiles and idealists had sought out the destination for its cachet as the birthplace of anti-British rebellion, and its reputation as the haven of political refugees from around the world whose cause was freedom and democracy. But already by the early twentieth century, cracks were beginning to show between this cherished American self-image, and the realities of U.S. political and economic ambition on the global scale; not to mention the realities of racism. Ram Chandra argued in the Hindustan Ghadar of May 10, 1917, that "America is a liberty giver to the whole world. She is an enemy of kings and a friend of republics.... We have not said these few words because England is an enemy of India, but because British rule is the enemy of republics." A few months later Bhagwan Singh's Yugantar, which he claimed was the true heir of the Dayal-era Ghadar, challenged, "Is America in this war for the freedom of slave nations?... When a nation which keeps in subjection the Philippines and Puerto Rico, then her claim appears a matter of astonishment to the whole world" Indeed, by the time of the United States' entry into the First World War, its ascendancy as Britain's successor as global hegemon was underway. The years immediately following the war marked a peak in the severe repression of political radicalism as well as of Asian immigration. Nevertheless, despite the failed war-time uprisings and the heavy repression of 1917 to 1918, a few Ghadar members quietly but faithfully tended the flame. By the early 1920s they had achieved a retrenchment and resurgence, drawing new recruits as well as veterans of the original movement, now emerging from prison or prudent obscurity.

As Puri points out, the domestic and international political situation had changed drastically since before the war. U.S. government policies now forcibly discourged both dissent and immigration, at the very moment that elsewhere the Russian Revolution was proclaiming a new vehicle for anti-colonial movements. Just as World War I had tended to channel anti-colonialism into nationalism, diffusing internationalism, the Communist International would channel what might later have been called Third World nationalism into left-inflected anti-colonialism. Moreover, the unexpected victory of the Bolsheviks channeled the anarcho-syndically tending international left, with which Ghadar had been connected, into stringently centralized Leninism. Having pragmatically identified the Communists as the most promising force in their favor on the world stage at that point, most committed Ghadarites now identified as Communists.

The American Communist Party sponsored Ghadar members to study in Moscow, where the post-war remnants of the BIC had also relocated. Ghadar sent delegates to the Third Congress of the Comintern, to Ho Chi Minh's 1925 International Union of the Oppressed Peoples of the East, and to the 1927 League Against Imperialism in Brussels. Ghadarites in China published the Hindustan Ghadar Dhandora in Hankow, forged links with the leftist faction of the Guomindang, and called on the Sikh troops in the region to abandon the British Army and fight for the Chinese revolution. Going beyond the merely moral, this support included arming a GMD unit of eighty Sikh watchmen-- payback in some way, perhaps, for the diasporic movement's years of advice and support from Sun Yat Sen? Finally, in the late 1920s to1930s other former Ghadarites went on to organize peasants' and workers' movements in India, as well as speaking out for Dalit and women�s rights. Among them PCHA ex-president Sohan Singh Bhakna, freed after sixteen years in Indian jails, was notable for his founding contributions to the Kisan Sabha and Communist Party of India. So tactical and ideological priorities evolved. But let me backtrack for a moment, to recapture the political moment of Ghadar's pre-war emergence.

Once the attempted uprising of 1915 was underway, and the would-be freedom fighters had boarded their ships to India, I doubt there was much discernible difference in the experiences of the Bengalis and Punjabis, the students and the farmers. They had all transformed themselves simply into revolutionaries: they undertook the same missions, were judged in the same courts and kept in the same jails. Yet in the ways in which they understood their missions still varied considerably. In the next two sections I will describe the two or more ghadars that were being fought under the capacious umbrella of solidarity in resistance.

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This and other oft-quoted Ghadar excerpts appear in most secondary sources, with slight variations in wording. The United States Department of War did English translations of Ghadar, culled specifically for use as incriminating evidence. These can be found in the National Archive research library at College Park, MD, along with extensive court transcripts and documentation of surveilled activities. For obvious reasons, given the government's bias and motivation, it is prudent to take these very selectively focused archival sources with a grain of salt. On the other hand, the Special Ghadar Collection housed at UC Berkeley's South and Southeast Asia Library contains a trove of personal memoirs and political writings by Ghadar members. See www.lib.berkeley.edu/SSEALS. Personal letters of Har Dayal are contained in the Van Wyck Brooks Papers, Van Pelt Library Rare Manuscripts Collection, University of Pennsylvania; and the David Starr Jordan Papers, Hoover Library, Stanford University. See also Har Dayal, Writings of Lala Hardayal ( Benares: Swaraj Publishing House, 1923?); Letters of Lala Har Dayal, Dharmavira, ed. (Ambala Cantt: Indian Book Agency, 1970); Forty-four months in Germany and Turkey, February 1915 to October 1918 (London: P.S. King & Son, 1920).

Brown, pp. 176-177.

Puri, pp. 108, 196.

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