Revolutionary nationalism
Revolutionary nationalism in India 1897-1934: secret societies, individual assassinations, the HSRA, and the parallel diaspora movements from Bengal to Punjab.
Defining the Stream
Revolutionary nationalism — also called revolutionary terrorism in colonial records and the militant nationalist underground in nationalist historiography — denotes the strand of the freedom struggle that rejected constitutional petitioning and Gandhian mass non-violence in favour of armed action, assassination of officials, dacoities to fund operations (the 'swadeshi dacoity'), and the manufacture of bombs. It must be distinguished from the 'militant' Extremism of Tilak, Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra Pal, who operated within the Congress and demanded swaraj through agitation, boycott and passive resistance.
The First Phase (1897-1917)
The earliest organised act was the assassination of Plague Commissioner W.C. Rand and Lt. Ayerst at Poona on 22 June 1897 by the Chapekar brothers, Damodar and Balkrishna, who were hanged. The movement crystallised after the Partition of Bengal (1905). The Anushilan Samiti, founded in Calcutta in 1902 (Pramatha Mitra, with Aurobindo Ghosh involved), and its Dhaka wing, plus Jugantar (Barindra Kumar Ghosh, Bhupendranath Datta), became the organisational core. The watershed was the Muzaffarpur incident of 30 April 1908, when Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki bombed a carriage intending to kill Magistrate Kingsford but killed Mrs and Miss Kennedy; Chaki shot himself, Khudiram Bose was hanged on 11 August 1908 aged 18. The subsequent Alipore Bomb Conspiracy Case (1908-09) prosecuted Aurobindo Ghosh (defended by C.R. Das) and Barindra Ghosh.
In Maharashtra, V.D. Savarkar founded the Abhinav Bharat (1904). His associate in London at India House (founded by Shyamji Krishna Varma, 1905), Madan Lal Dhingra, assassinated Sir William Curzon Wyllie in London on 1 July 1909. Rashbehari Bose and Sachin Sanyal organised the Delhi-Lahore Conspiracy, throwing a bomb at Viceroy Hardinge during his ceremonial entry into Delhi on 23 December 1912.
The Ghadar and Wartime Conspiracy
Abroad, the Ghadar Party was founded at San Francisco in November 1913 under Sohan Singh Bhakna (president) and Lala Har Dayal (the moving spirit), publishing the Ghadar paper from the 'Yugantar Ashram'. The First World War triggered the planned Ghadar Mutiny of 21 February 1915 across Punjab cantonments, betrayed by Kirpal Singh and crushed; the Lahore Conspiracy Case followed. The parallel Hindu-German Conspiracy sought German arms via the Berlin Committee. This first phase ebbed after the war, partly absorbed into the Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-22).