In 30 Seconds
Story
In a Benares court in 1921, a fifteen year old boy arrested in the Non Cooperation picketing was asked his name and answered Azad, free, his father’s name Swatantrata, independence, and his home the prison house. The magistrate awarded fifteen lashes, the boy took them, the legend records, with a cry of victory at each stroke, and Chandrashekhar Tiwari left the whipping post as Chandrashekhar Azad, carrying a vow that became his biography, that the police would never take him alive. For a decade they never did, and the keeping of the vow, in a park in Allahabad in 1931, made him the revolution’s undying commander, Azad in the name and Azad at the end.
The road to the whipping post had begun in the forest. Born in 1906 at Bhavra in the tribal country of central India, where his father, a poor Brahmin of Unnao stock, served in the state gardens, the boy grew up among the Bhils, learning the bow and the jungle before he learned much else, and was sent in adolescence to Benares for the Sanskrit schooling that the movement interrupted permanently. When Gandhi suspended Non Cooperation in 1922, the sixteen year old joined the orphaned generation that turned to the underground, entering the Hindustan Republican Association through Manmathnath Gupta’s circle, and the organisation discovered in the unlettered boy its natural soldier, fearless, tireless, a marksman the others deferred to and a manager of men and money whom no hardship touched. He was in the party at Kakori in August 1925, and when the great case swept up the association’s leadership, Azad alone of the principals was never caught, beginning the fugitive decade in which he rebuilt the shattered movement from nothing, wandering central India as sadhu, mechanic and driver, organising in Jhansi’s ravines where the band trained at shooting in the Orchha forests, until at Ferozeshah Kotla in 1928 the reconstruction was complete and the HSRA elected him commander in chief of its army, Balraj the name he signed to its proclamations, the Punjab intellectuals supplying the theory, Panditji, as they all called him, supplying the war.
His command ran through every action of the association’s great years. He planned and covered the Saunders operation at Lahore in December 1928, shooting down the pursuing constable as the party withdrew, managed the escapes that followed, sat against the Assembly plan that would spend Bhagat Singh and was overruled by the man himself, directed the bombing of the Viceroy’s train near Delhi in December 1929, and threw the organisation’s remnant, after the Lahore sentences, into the desperate schemes to break his comrades out of the condemned cells, schemes that consumed the association’s last resources and men, Bhagwati Charan Vohra dying with a test bomb in his hands on the Ravi’s bank. Betrayals and the police’s grinding attrition closed the circle through 1930, and Azad, hunted across northern India with a reward on his head, worked on at the impossible double task, the rescue of the condemned and the party’s survival, meeting Nehru at Anand Bhavan in February 1931 in a strange, recorded interview to ask whether the Gandhi Irwin negotiations might spare the three, and receiving no comfort.
The end kept the vow. On the morning of 27 February 1931, in Allahabad’s Alfred Park, an informer’s word brought Superintendent Nott Bower’s police upon him as he sat with a comrade. Azad sent the younger man out of the trap, took a tree for cover, and fought the encircling force with his Colt pistol through twenty minutes and more, wounded thrice, killing and wounding among his attackers, until a single round remained, and that one, as the vow required, he spent on himself. The police, it is recorded, approached the body only after long minutes, and fired into it to be sure, the fear outlasting the man. The park is now Chandrashekhar Azad Park, the pistol sits in the Allahabad Museum, and the tree, cut down by an administration embarrassed by its pilgrims, was replanted by them, the legend proving harder to fell. He was twenty four, had led the armed revolution for six years, and left no writings, no theory and no grave, only the name he had given the magistrate and made true, and the sentence every schoolchild learns with it, that he remained, to the last bullet, Azad.
