The Ghadar Party – Historical Assessment
of an Indian Revolutionary Movement
Emily Datta
Though the Ghadar Party had particular importance in
Punjab, its ideology and program of revolution was not
unique in twentieth century India. One of its most
significant aspects, however, was that, unlike Bengal, it
represented the politicization of Punjabi peasants whose
experiences as immigrants had forged the common links
of their Indian identity and created a sense of urgency
in freeing India.
The Indian National Congress and Ghandiji’s political strategy were central to India’s struggle for freedom from British imperialism. For this reason, the concentration of scholarly research on the growth of Congress and on the implementation of stayagraha in Indian nationalist politics has obscured the part played in the struggle by other groups and individuals who acted outside the political framework represented by Congress. Indian revolutionaries who fought and died for their motherland did not share the Congress’ initial belief in the effectiveness of “politics of petition”. Long before Congress members were accustomed to prison, the government buildings which the revolutionaries knew best were courtrooms and jails. Until recently, their lives and deeds remained the province of British officials searching for sedition, of the myth-makers and of the balladeers.
It was in Bengal, in the first decade of this century, that revolutionary and terrorist activities began to occur with some regularity. Small groups of terrorists were active in Madras and in the Poona region, but, until the time of the planned Ghadar rising of 1915, Bengal remained the most important center of revolutionary activity. In Bengal, the revolutionary appeal was strongest among the bhadralok who were the province’s western-educated elite. As possibilities of finding jobs consonant with their expectations and training shrank alarmingly, a number of young and educated Bengalis channeled their discontent into terrorism. The Russian revolutionaries provided a tactical model for the Bengalis, but this was buttressed by the teachings of Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, in which service to the motherland and the struggle to free India from Britain became “a great and holy yajana … (with) Liberty the fruit we seek from the sacrifice, and the Motherland the Goddess to whom we offer it”. Possessed of both the tactics and the ideology of revolution, young Bengalis turned to violence in hopes of freeing India. Daring dacoities and bombs thrown at the omnipotent Englishmen stunned the Indian public, and formed a pattern that became familiar to the British government as terrorism began to appear in other parts of India. But the British stayed on another forty years in Bengal.
Within India there was little effort to coordinate activities from province to province. But, after the turn of the century, young men inspired by the lives of European patriots and convinced of the futility of parliamentary politics began to find their way to Europe and to England. In London, in Paris and in Berlin, a network of Indian revolutionaries began to take shape as new men were brought into organizations that served the cause abroad, and as older members made their way from country to country in search of financing and recruits. It was this international network that provided the Ghadar Party with its contacts outside the United States and that channeled funds secured abroad to help finance the Ghadarites’ program in India.
The Ghadar Party, with its headquarters in San Francisco and its roots in the Punjabi immigrant community of rural California, was also dedicated to winning India’s freedom by revolution. In Punjab, unlike Bengal, the impetus for terrorism and revolutionary violence came not from a discontented and underemployed educated elite, but from the Punjabi peasants who had emigrated to the U.S. and Canada. And, though Punjab was almost infamous during the years before the Ghadar rising for its inattention to nationalist politics and known for the loyalty of the Punjabi soldiers in the British Indian Army, the province was not totally without a tradition that could be identified as the antecedent of the Ghadar uprising.
Some scholars locate the origins of Punjab’s revolutionary tradition and of Punjab’s first round of the fight for freedom in the Kuka rebellion of 1886. At that time, the Kuka Sikhs led by their guru, Ram Singh, tried to steal guns that were to be used to overthrow the British government. The mutiny mentality that reflected the paranoia of certain British officials in the Punjab perceived the Kukas as “not committed to mere murder and dacoity; they are open rebels, offering contumacious resistance to constituted authority”. After their abortive uprising in 1886, many of the participants were summarily executed by an overzealous British officer. The great majority of Punjabis at the time were unsympathetic or hostile to the Kukas, an attitude which would be echoed in 1915. Punjab waited almost forty years for the next attempt to overthrow British rule in Punjab by force of arms. When it came, it was led by the Ghadar Party.
The Ghadar Party’s main support came from Punjabi peasants who had begun to migrate from Punjab in the 1890’s. Moving east to Hong Kong and further east to the United States, and Canada in search of better wages, these men, most of them Sikh, worked as laborers in the Pacific Northwest. During the slump of 1907, Punjabis in Canada found themselves the butt of racial prejudice, as had other Asian immigrant groups also sources of cheap labor, who preceded them. The Punjabis were vilified as “ragheads” and the “turbanes tide”, and they found themselves at the storm center of racial tensions that occasionally flared into violence. Stung by their bitter experiences with prejudice and bigotry, disheartened by the British government’s failure to assist with problems of immigration to Canada, harboring a persecuted immigrant’s need to reaffirm his cultural identity, the Indians in California and the other coastal states were primed to be receptive to the idea of fighting a revolutionary struggle for India’s freedom.
When England became involved in World War I, both her attention and manpower were diverted from the Empire. Indian revolutionaries in India, Europe and America saw that they had a perfect opportunity to begin the armed struggle in India. Germany was approached successfully for both money and arms, but the Indian community in California became the center of efforts to organize and sustain the revolution. In 1913, the Indians resident on the west coast of the U.S. coalesced around the dynamic leadership of Har Dayal and Jawala Singh, as they and other prominent local leaders toured the California countryside calling meetings to organize for the revolution. At each meeting, many men pledged to return to India to fight, and they gave freely of their often meager financial resources.
A building in San Francisco was purchased to serve as headquarters. Under the direction of Ram Chandra, a far-reaching propaganda machine was set into motion. Leaflets were printed in many of the north Indian languages as well as English and German. A newspaper, the Ghadar, was published regularly, its potential effectiveness acknowledged by the Government of India’s ban on its circulation. The paper reached countless Indians in immigrant communities throughout the world and found its way as well into the hands of Punjabis in the Indian Army. But the newspapers and leaflets were meant to prepare the way for the revolution.
With the help of Germany and Indians in Europe, arrangements were made to secure arms, though the failure of the Annie Larson’s mission was to leave the Ghadarites in India without promised weapons. In 1914, the first of several shiploads of Ghadarites set sail from the U.S., picking up bands of like-minded men at various far-eastern ports along the way. British intelligence officials managed to identify the revolutionaries on board this ship and intercepted them as they landed at Calcutta. The repressive Ingress Ordinance that had been passed to deal with such an eventuality allowed the imperial government to restrict the movements of many of the returnees. Additional shiploads of Ghadarites continued to arrive in India, however, and although British security measures were responsible for limiting the activities of some twenty-five hundred Ghadarites to their villages, estimates are that from three to five thousand men eluded the government net to make their way upcountry from the ports to the Punjab.
In conjunction with revolutionary leaders from Bengal and the United Provinces, the Ghadarites had planned a mass uprising for February 19, 1915. In preparation, army units were contacted in the hopes that the soldiers would agree to join the uprising. The revolutionaries’ strategy saw the subversion of the army as a key to the risings success. Not only would it have great shock value, but without its collaboration, the British would be handicapped in dealing with widespread outbreaks of violence.
Though some troops mutinied, the Ghadar of 1915 failed. The effectiveness of the British police destroyed the movement’s potential. One hundred forty-seven Ghadarites were brought to trial in the famous Lahore Conspiracy Case; twenty-eight were hanged, one hundred sixteen were sentenced to less final punishment. The Ghadar rising did not start a revolution in the Punjabi countryside. Guns and ammunition never arrived. The men who returned were poorly organized. Internal security among the leaders in India was fatally weak. What then is the significance of the Ghadar movement? What niche does it find in the history of the creation of the Indian nation?
Clearly, Congress and its political styles and the political institutions created by the British government were crucial elements in determining the manner in which India fought for her freedom. The Indian masses were brought into nationalist politics not through widespread support of revolutionary activity , but through the efforts of Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah and provincial political leaders who, after the reforms of 1935 had greatly increased the electorate, intensified their efforts to mobilize Indian peasants in support of the ultimately successful thrust for Indian independence that brought in its wake the creation of Pakistan.
Indian revolutionaries, however, were not totally without influence either on the British of their fellow countrymen. The Ghadar rising in Punjab was especially threatening to the British, for the Sikhs were represented in the army in numbers vastly disproportionate to their percentage of the population. The Raj’s vulnerability in the face of disaffection of the army was acknowledged by the Lt. Governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, when he wrote that “the Ghadar Conspiracy would have produced in the Province a state of affairs similar to that of Hindustan in the Mutiny of 1857.” Almost as threatening to the Punjab administrators was the fact that the Ghadarites were peasants and could not easily be discounted as unrepresentative western-educated city babus, though persistent efforts were made by O’Dwyer and others to discredit the Ghadarites as apostates from Sikhism. Thus the Ghadar Party’s activities in Punjab, and those of other revolutionary and terrorist bodies in other parts of India, contributed to the increasing sense of insecurity among the British rulers, while other processes set in motion by the British themselves worked to hasten the end of the Raj.
A crucial element in the Ghadarites failure in 1915 was the Punjabi peasants lack of support. The Punjabi kisans were prosperous and many of them had long traditions of service in the British Indian Army that had contributed to their own and to their families well-being. In 1915, there were few men who were prepared to stake their prosperity against the chancy outcome of the Ghadar rebellion. But the Ghadarites had brought back within themselves a newly awakened political awareness fueled by their experiences as Indian emigrants in the white man’s dominions.
Perhaps one of the Ghadar Party’s most important legacies was its contribution to the politicization of the Punjabi peasant community. The trial in Lahore generated sentiment directed against British oppression. But the lasting contribution of the Ghadar Party in Punjab came after 1915, in the political involvement of the men who had returned to Punjab. There are well-established though poorly documented connections between the Ghadarites and the peasant-oriented Communist Party in the Punjab. Punjabi untouchable leaders gained expertise in the movement. It is possible that research on the Babbar Akalis would discover a connection with returned Ghadaraties as well. And undoubtedly, those five thousand men who returned to Punjab must have carried in their hearts a cherished vision of a free India and shared that vision with their fellow-villagers.
The surprisingly large amount of primary and secondary material on the Ghadar Party which has been located in the course of the preparation of the bibliography being prepared on the party delineated fairly clearly the party’s origins, its organization and its activities until 1919. What is needed now is an exploration of the role the party played in the lives of the Sikh community in California after the trial of 1918, and an exploration of the paths taken by the returnees, for that should make even more clear the Ghadarites’ contribution to and participation in Punjab politics and the struggle for Indian independence.
Source: “The Sikh Sansar”, Volume 2, Number 2, June 1973