A Genealogy of Terrorism by Joseph McQuade

Author:Joseph McQuade [McQuade, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

‘The Appeal of Sikhs Was Specially Obnoxious’

Over the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, revolutionary groups in Bengal such as Jugantar and the Anushilan Samiti achieved varying degrees of success in expanding their operations and in staging attacks against colonial informants and imperial officials, most notably in the highly publicized bomb attack against Hardinge by Rash Behari Bose in 1912.36 With the onset of war, these plans became more ambitious, and organizations in Punjab, Bengal, and central India sought to combine their resources to stage an all-India uprising, with Bose as a key organizer. Beginning on 12 February, Bose and his associates began making arrangements for a general rising on the 21st of that month, which was to be modelled after the mutiny of 1857. The Indian Army was the key element of the conspiracy, and revolutionaries attempted to disseminate revolutionary propaganda to troops stationed in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Ferozepore, and Meerut. Furthermore, the revolutionaries prepared bombs, arms, and ammunition, as well as flags, equipment for destroying railways and telegraph wires, and even a formal declaration of war.37

The police foiled the conspiracy by planting a spy named Kripal Singh into the inner circle of the revolutionaries. On 15 February, Singh overheard a conversation regarding the plans for the rising and informed the police. Although Bose realised that Singh was an informant and had the date of the rising moved up to 19 February, Singh was able to escape for long enough to signal his contacts in the CID, leading to a massive crackdown on revolutionary operations across India.38 Following the failure of the conspiracy, Bose’s lieutenant Sachindranath Sanyal attempted to carry on the fight, printing a new Liberty leaflet that implored its readers to honour the sacrifice of those captured by the police. ‘You may die any day of plague, cholera or malaria,’ Sanyal wrote in the Liberty leaflets confiscated at the time of his arrest. ‘Why not die like a man in a noble cause? Look at the Germans who are dying in lakhs for their country. Dwellers in India, you must also die in lakhs.’39 By juxtaposing Indian patriotism with that of the Germans, Sanyal articulated the revolutionary cause through the language of war. He also sought to reframe the defeat of his revolutionary companions as a kind of victory through sacrifice that he hoped would inspire others to join the anti-colonial cause.

Although Rash Behari Bose escaped the widespread crackdown, his co-conspirators, including V. G. Pingle, were prosecuted by Special Tribunal in the Lahore conspiracy trial, where the evidence provided by Kripal Singh played a key role in securing convictions. Singh’s role as a paid police spy initially raised questions about the reliability of his testimony, but it was ultimately concluded that the government were ‘no doubt justified in employing spies; and … a person so employed [does not] deserve to be blamed if he instigates an offence no further than by pretending to concur with the perpetrators’.40 Out of 291 conspirators arrested, 42 were executed, another 114 given life sentences, and the rest either acquitted or given sentences of varying degrees.

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