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Revolutionaries Outside India

Revolutionaries Outside India

Indian revolutionaries got their weapons from various sources. Foreign sailors coming ashore at Calcutta port were a good source of small arms. Some revolutionaries purchased guns from drug smugglers operating between North India and Turkey. One revolutionary secured employment with a firm of importers and managed to divert ten cases of small arms and ammunition to his colleagues in the movement.
The revolutionaries were also helped by Indians settled abroad. India House established in London by Shyamji Krishnavarma, a follower of Swami Dayanand, was a haven for revolutionaries like V.D. Savarkar, Lala Hardayal and Madanlal Dhingra, the young nationalist who shot dead Curzon Wyllie, advisor to the Secretary of State for India, July 1, 1909.
Shyamji was a Sanskrit scholar turned businessman who had made London his base in 1897. Revolutionaries based in London and Paris could always rely on his support. Among the revolutionaries operating from Paris were Madame Bhikaiji Rustom K.R. Cama, 'Mother of the Indian Revolution' and Sardar Singh Rana. The two attended the International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, in Germany in 1907, when Madame Cama unfurled the Indian flag.
Many Indian students, after completing their studies in England, returned home with a gift from Savarkar — a Browning pistol. These pistols were popular with the revolutionaries and hundreds found their way into India. A young revolutionary named Chaturbhuj brought in twenty of them, concealed in the false bottom of his suitcase.
Savarkar was arrested and sent back to India to face trial in the Nasik Conspiracy Case. He made a daring bid to escape through the porthole of the ship bringing him to India while it was at Marseilles in France. He swam to shore but was re-captured. He was sentenced to transportation for life in the Andamans where his elder brother, Ganesh Savarkar was already serving a life term.
On 1st November 1913, Indians settled in America (they numbered about 30,000, most of them from the Punjab) formed an association that came to be identified with its weekly paper, Ghadar (Rebellion).


Ghadar which was published in Urdu, Hindi, Gurmukhi and English, declared:
"What is our name? Mutiny. What is our work? Mutiny. Where will mutiny break out? In India. The time will come when rifles and blood will take the place of pen and ink."
Lala Hardayal was the moving spirit behind the Ghadar movement in America. Later Ram Chandra carried on the work.
The Ghadar party strived to mould public opinion in America in favour of Indian independence. In 1915 in Philadelphia, 10,000 American citizens joined the Ghadar parade to protest against British atrocities in India. Gadar reported : "Philadelphia, the home of Benjamin Franklin knows full well what it is for a nation to struggle for recognition of foreign powers."
Indian revolutionaries received ready support from the German government when the First World War broke out in 1914. It suited German interests to promote revolutionary activity in India. Nothing would have pleased the Germans more than an armed rebellion in India with Indian soldiers rising in mutiny against their English masters.
An Indo-German mission led by Raja Mahendra Pratap arrived in Afghanistan soon after the war broke out. The raja succeeded in winning Afghan support and set up a provisional government of India, in Kabul in December, 1915.
The government in India was perturbed by the activities of the revolutionaries and sometimes reacted with panic.
When the Japanese vessel, Komagata Maru, carrying a large number of Punjabis docked at Budge Budge near Hooghly on 29 September 1914, the government suspected some of the passengers to be Ghadar sympathisers. The passengers were in fact, Sikhs who had wanted to migrate to Canada. The Canadian authorities had refused them entry and sent the ship back.
When the ship arrived at Budge Budge harbour, the authorities would not allow the passengers to disembark and proceed to Calcutta where they could have found employment. Instead they were ordered to board a train that was to take them to the Punjab. When the Sikhs attempted to visit a Gurdwara at Hooghly they were fired upon by the police and army units. Eighteen Sikhs were killed and twenty-five injured.
This senseless slaughter of innocents turned the people of the Punjab against the British. The Punjab and the Northwest provinces became a hotbed of revolutionary activity.

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