In 30 Seconds
Story
On a September night in 1928, in the ruins of Ferozeshah Kotla in Delhi, delegates of the revolutionary groups of northern India met in secret and refounded their movement under a name that added one word to the old one and a world of meaning with it. The Hindustan Republican Association, bled white by the Kakori hangings, became the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, and the addition announced that the young men of the gun had acquired, in the prison years, a political philosophy. The HSRA of 1928 to 1931, the organisation of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, was the revolutionary movement’s intellectual coming of age, the point at which the cult of sacrifice acquired a theory of society.
The old HRA had been the child of the post Non Cooperation ebb, founded in 1924 by Sachindra Nath Sanyal and Ram Prasad Bismil to gather the young whom Chauri Chaura’s halt had orphaned, and its manifesto had already sketched a federal republic with universal suffrage and an end to exploitation. But its idiom remained the older one, oaths, the Gita, the goddess of the earlier Bengal societies, and Kakori’s gallows took its founding generation. The rebuilding fell to the survivor the police could never hold, Azad, and to the circle of readers gathered in Lahore around the National College and the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Bhagwati Charan Vohra and his wife Durga Devi, Yashpal, the future novelist, among them, young men who had spent the movement’s quiet years in the Dwarkadas library working through Marx, Lenin, Bakunin and the literature of Ireland and Russia, and who brought to Ferozeshah Kotla the conclusion their reading had ripened, that the enemy was not the Englishman but the system, and that a freedom which merely changed the colour of the exploiters, brown thrones on white foundations, was not worth a martyr’s rope.
The reorganisation gave the conviction structure. The HSRA’s political wing, under a central committee of the provinces’ delegates, was to educate and organise, its statements insisting that revolution meant the reign of the toilers and that the movement’s violence was instrument, not creed. Its military wing, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army under Azad as commander in chief, was to perform the actions, and the doctrine of action itself was rewritten, the propaganda of the deed, each operation designed less to damage the state than to speak, through the courtroom and the press, to the country. The philosophy was set out in the documents that became the movement’s scriptures, the Naujawan Bharat Sabha’s manifesto with its warning against religious politics, the leaflets of the actions to come, Bhagwati Charan’s The Philosophy of the Bomb, answering Gandhi’s condemnation with the case for revolutionary violence as the oppressed’s reply to organised force, and, from the condemned cell at the story’s end, Bhagat Singh’s testament To Young Political Workers, counselling the movement, in its last testament, toward mass organisation of workers and peasants, the gun subordinated to the party, an arc, in three years, from the bomb to something close to its renunciation.
The actions themselves, Saunders, the Assembly, the trials and the gallows, belong to the chapters that follow, and so does the organisation’s destruction, betrayals and the Delhi and Lahore cases consuming its cadre, Azad’s death in 1931 closing the military chapter. What outlived the roll of martyrs was the synthesis Ferozeshah Kotla had made. The HSRA fused the national revolution with the social question a decade before the Congress left absorbed that fusion, and its survivors and readers carried it everywhere, into the Congress Socialist Party, the communist movement, the trade unions of the north. The Raj hanged the association’s leaders and printed, in its own court records, their ideas, the most efficient publication the Indian left ever secured, and the word added in the Kotla’s ruins, socialist, entered through those records the permanent vocabulary of Indian politics, written eventually, by another assembly, into the preamble of the republic the young men had imagined.
