Daily Times

On March 6, 2013, I gave a talk at the Desh Bhagat Hall (Memorial Hall of Patriots) in Jalandhar on my Punjab partition book. When Professor Parminder Singh and I arrived a meeting was going on. Some senior comrades and visiting Indian trade unionists from the UK were discussing activities later in the year to celebrate 100 years of the founding of the first revolutionary party of the 20th century in India. Unfortunately the history of the shared Indian freedom struggle is never told in Pakistan; all attention is given to the two-nation theory. My lecture was attended by a fairly large gathering, which included some veterans who were living histories of a bygone age when dreams of another type of free India animated them to anti-colonial actions. After my lecture on the Punjab partition there was a very spirited discussion on my findings.

Now, just a few months before coming to India I had reviewed Ajay Bhardwaj’s documentary, Kite mil we Mahi, in which sufism and the Dalits of the Indian Punjab and some revolutionary poets figured prominently. To my very great surprise, I saw Baba Bhagat Singh Bilga (died 2009), a veteran revolutionary, being interviewed on the Dalit question in the Desh Bhagat Hall. I had met him some 20 years earlier at his son’s home in the UK. He had a lot to tell about his activities as a young Ghadarite in Latin America and North America. Babaji told me that in 1942 he was in Lahore and attended the court marriage of the late Mazhar Ali Khan and Comrade Tahira. In Bhardwaj’s documentary he was strongly supportive of the Punjab Dalits’ movement to gain respect and recognition. Babaji was saying that the Dalits should be welcomed and made equal partners in building a fairer and equal India.

The Ghadarites were the first in the 20th century to take up the liberation of India from the yoke of colonial rule. In India a lot has been written on the Ghadar Party. Professor Harish K Puri’s, Ghadar Movement, (New Delhi: National Book Trust of India, 2011), is the best short history on it. The foundational meeting of Hindustan Ghadar Party was held by Indian workers on June 4, 1913, in the Finnish Socialist Hall, Astoria, Oregon. Its stalwart leaders were Lala Har Dayal of Delhi (I met his granddaughter in Delhi Gymkhana) and Sohan Singh Bhakna from a village in Amritsar district of the Punjab. The name Ghadar was taken from the 1857 Mutiny or Ghadar. Among Muslims, Maulvi Mohammad Barkatullah Khan, from the Central Provinces, was the main Muslim leader of the Ghadarites. He was instrumental in trying to find a base for the party in Afghanistan and even tried to establish a government-in-exile on Afghan soil.

The largest component of the Ghadar Party was Punjabis, mostly Sikhs, who had served the British Empire as soldiers and in other subordinate capacities all over the world. Exposure to western standards of living attracted them to seek a better future in Canada and thus escape poverty which prevalent all over India of colonial exploitation and the concomitant economic downturn of those times. Most famously, it was the refusal to permit the 376 Indians aboard to disembark the chartered Japanese vessel, Komagata Maru, which arrived in the Bay of Vancouver in the summer of that ignited the spark to incite an uprising in India to overthrow British rule. Tariq Malik’, Chanting Denied Shores (2011), is an outstanding novel that shows how unfair the Canadian authorities were to the prospective immigrants who were after two months compelled to return to India.

In any event, from Professor Harish Puri’s short history of the Ghadar Party we learn that the outbreak of World War I in 1914 hastened the revolutionary movement but the majority of the people were not willing to support the uprising. The revolutionaries were considered crazy idealists. The intelligence agencies had infiltrated the party and although some parts of the Punjab witnessed revolutionary upsurge it was easily crushed by the state. Those arrested were put on trial and handed down severe sentences. More than 150 were executed; twice that number was sent to the Andaman Islands for life or shorter sentences. Over time, however, their sacrifices began to be acknowledged by their countrymen and many became part of folklore and began to be remembered as the Babas (old men), symbolising respect for old age and the wisdom born of experience and suffering.

The Ghadar Party published the Ghadar in both Urdu and Gurmukhi. The Ghadar ideology comprised the following ideas: overthrow of British rule; armed struggle with the support of patriotic Indian soldiers; collaboration with Germany to defeat Britain; secular nationalism comprising all religious communities and nationalities of India; complete opposition to communalism; public non-cooperation and civil disobedience; democratic and republican political system; prosperity and social justice; and, international outlook and international connections.

The last principle was reflective of the connection they had with nationalists and revolutionaries of many countries and the branches they established all over the world. Germany even tried to send arms to the Indian revolutionaries though these were sent to the Bengalis by German diplomats serving in the US. All such heroic fervour was in vain. In the Punjab the Lt Governor Michael O’Dwyer, who later gained notoriety for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 13, 1919, received complete support from the landed gentry. In fact, many sang praise of O’Dwyer for dealing with the revolutionaries with an iron-fist.

Bhagat Singh and his comrades were inspired by the Ghadarites. They carried forward the tradition of revolutionary resistance. However, mainstream politics came to be dominated by the Congress Party, with its emphasis on non-violence under Mahatma Gandhi. The Congress politics of mass movement and civil disobedience came into conflict with the Muslim League’s demand for a separate state. Revolutionary politics could never become centre stage in the freedom struggle.

The writer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan; Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University; and Honorary Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at:billumian@gmail.com