Ghadar Movement

The Ghadar Movement or Ghadar Party was an early 20th-century, international political movement founded by expatriate Panjabi s to overthrow British rule in India. Many of the Ghadar Party founders and leaders, including Sohan Singh Bhakna, went on and join the Babbar Akali Movement and helped it in logistics as a party and publishing its own newspaper in the post-World War I era. The early movement was created by revolutionaries who lived and worked on the West Coast of the United States and Canada, and the movement later spread to India and Indian diasporic communities around the world. The official founding has been dated to a meeting on 15 July 1913 in Astoria, Oregon, and the group splintered into two factions the first time in 1914, with the Sikh-majority faction known as the “Azad Punjab Ghadar” and the Hindu-majority faction known as the “Hindustan Ghadar.” The Azad Punjab Ghadar Party’s headquarters and anti-colonial newspaper publications headquarters remained in the Stockton Gurdwara in Stockton, California, and the Hindustan Ghadar Party’s headquarters and Hindustan Ghadar newspaper relocated to nearby Oakland, California.

During World War I in 1914, the Ghadar Movement, a group of Indian revolutionaries, allied with Germany, finding common ground in their opposition to British imperial rule in India. 1 Germany strategically considered these revolutionaries vital allies against the British Empire. Their collaborative goal was to destabilize British control through a multifaceted strategy, encompassing a synchronized effort to invade British India via Afghanistan, provide resources to bolster the Indian independence movement, and disseminate propaganda to incite mutiny within the British Indian Army. Consequently, some Ghadar party members returned to Punjab to instigate an armed revolution for Indian Independence. The Ghadar Mutiny, as this uprising became known, involved Ghadarites smuggling arms into India and encouraging Indian troops to revolt against the British. This attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, leading to the execution of 42 mutineers after the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial. Undeterred, Ghadarites continued underground anti-colonial actions from 1914 to 1917 with support from Germany and Ottoman Turkey, a period known as the Hindu–German Conspiracy, which culminated in a sensational trial in San Francisco in 1917.

Following the war's conclusion, the party in the United States fractured into a Communist and an Indian Socialist faction. The party was formally dissolved in 1948. Key participants in the Ghadar Movement included K. B. Menon, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Mewa Singh Lopoke, Bhai Parmanand, Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, Har Dayal, Tarak Nath Das, Bhagat Singh Thind, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Udham Singh, Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barakatullah, Rashbehari Bose, Ishar Singh Gill and Gulab Kaur. The insurrectionary ideals of the Ghadar Party influenced members of the Indian Independence Movement opposed to Gandhian nonviolence. To carry out other revolutionary activities, "Swadesh Sevak Home" at Vancouver and United India House at Seattle was set-up.

In 1914, Kasi Ram Joshi a member of the party from Haryana, returned to India from America. On 15 March 1915 he was hanged by the colonial government.Haryana Samvad
, Jan 2018. Founding member Har Dayal severed all connections in an open letter published in March 1919 in Indian newspapers and wrote to the British Government asking for amnesty.

Background

Between 1903 and 1913 approximately 10,000 South Asians emigres entered North America, mostly from the rural regions of central Punjab. About half the Punjabis had served in the British military. The Canadian government decided to curtail this influx with a series of laws, which were aimed at limiting the entry of South Asians into the country and restricting the political rights of those already in the country. Many migrants came to work in the fields, factories, and logging camps of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, where they were exposed to labor unions and the ideas of the radical Industrial Workers of the World or IWW. The migrants of the Pacific Northwest banded together in Sikh gurdwaras and formed political Hindustani Associations for mutual aid.

Nationalist sentiments were also building around the world among South Asian emigres and students, where they could organize more freely than in British India. Several dozen students came to study at the University of Berkeley, some spurred by a scholarship offered by a wealthy Punjabi farmer. Revolutionary intellectuals like Har Dayal and Taraknath Das attempted to organize students and educate them in anarchist and nationalist ideas.

RasBihari Bose on request from Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, an American trained Ghadar, who met Bose at Benares and requested him to take up the leadership of the coming revolution. But before accepting the responsibility, he sent Sachin Sanyal to the Punjab to assess the situation. Sachin returned very optimistic, in the United States and Canada with the aim to liberate India from British rule. The movement began with a group of immigrants known as the Hindustani Workers of the Pacific Coast.

Indian immigrants, largely from Punjab (British India)">Punjab