On 12 February, Rash Behari Bose announced the date for the rising as the 21st, only a week and a half away. Emissaries fanned out to the cantonments and military installations to confirm their readiness and pin down the plan. Lahore and Ferozepore would serve as flint and tinder to the rest, which they hoped would then explode like a string of firecrackers spanning northern India from Lahore to Dacca. They would have to move fast, as there was a rumor that the Twenty-third Cavalry was soon to be transferred out to the front. Indeed, some regiments were already gone. When Kartar Singh brought the news to Randhir Singh, a priest serving the garrison at Ferozepore, he found the latter leading a prayer meeting in honor of some Indian soldiers stationed in France.130
Meanwhile, there were still flags, uniforms, emblems, and declarations of war to be prepared, recalled Rattan Singh,131 corroborating the Sedition Committee Report’s list of last minute tasks: “Bombs were prepared; arms were got together; flags were made ready; a declaration of war was drawn up; instruments were collected for destroying railways and telegraph wires.” When the latter were cut, the last message they sent would be the signal for the uprising.132
The plan was carefully laid: at Lahore, a small group of returnees would gather by the railway line. A guide from the cantonment would lead a half dozen of them to infiltrate the barracks emptied during roll call and collect the swords abandoned there, while another guide escorted a second squad to the reservists’ quarter guard to seize rifles and ammunition. At this point the cavalrymen would unleash the “massacre of the Europeans and British Artillery”133 in pursuit of the maxim “Maro firangi ko!” (Kill the westerners!).134
At Ferozepore, eight “disaffected” sepoys of the Twenty-sixth Punjabis were tapped as guides for teams of returned Ghadarites in attacks on several depots, the magazine, the arsenal, and the regimental lines. Amid the roar of the rampaging troops, the rebels would then mob the army camps, release political prisoners, secure all stores of arms and ammunition, and fortify all local cells sufficiently to hold out for a full year (in the process of which they too must maro firangi ko as much as they could). Randhir Singh set forth the plan to his flock after a prayer meeting and received a positive response.135
However, they were betrayed by an informer in their midst. Raw Punjab Criminal Investigation Department police recruit Kirpal Singh was Balwant Singh’s cousin, whom Nidhan Singh had also known and vouched for in Shanghai. With such credentials all had trusted him, and he had won his way with (in retrospect) disturbing swiftness into the confidence of Bose and the inner circle. As soon as Kirpal Singh learned the proposed date of the uprising he informed the authorities, revealing to them the details of ongoing subversive activities. In the meantime he wired the Amritsar police to notify them of a large gathering of the chief conspirators in Lahore. Luckily he lacked contacts among the Lahore police, who would have gotten there faster, and so the mutineers slipped the noose this time. Kirpal Singh then carried on as if he were a committed revolutionary, helping with final preparations among the Twenty-third Cavalry and also among the villagers of Dadher near Amritsar, some of whom had been assigned to loot the local police station, seize its arms, and march to Lahore. In actuality he was arranging to have them ambushed.136
But Kirpal Singh had started to provoke suspicion through some indiscretions in asking questions, and even more after being sighted at the railway platform in Amritsar (waiting for the police) when he was supposed to be at Lahore with the Twenty-third. Realizing there had been a leak, the organizing committee pushed the date of the rising up a couple of days to 19 February. When the informer returned to Lahore on the morning of the 19th, he found the gears already in motion. He nevertheless managed to get an emergency alert to his contact, K. B. Liaquat Hayat Khan, deputy inspector of police in Amritsar: “It’s happening tonight.”
At his signal, the police rushed the movement headquarters in Lahore and captured seven key organizers. Three more were apprehended, returning unawares to the house. The police also seized three finished bombs and sundry other materiel, flags, and incriminating papers. A coded warning was then radioed to the cantonments in plenty of time for military authorities to take preventive actions, which even Michael O’Dwyer admitted were “in some cases perhaps excessive.”137 Indian guards were replaced with English ones, and all absent personnel were recalled to bases, at which troop levels were already the lowest in years. “Truckloads of white soldiers pour[ed] in” as British troops patrolled Lahore, Delhi, Ambala, and Ferozepore, rounding up as many of the rebel leaders as they could find.138
In Shaukat Usmani’s pithy assessment, “Alas!”139 The rest crumbled. At 7:00 p.m. when the entire regiment at the Lahore Cantonment was abruptly ordered to fall in, mutiny coordinator Lance Daffadar Lachman Singh of the Twenty-third Cavalry knew something was wrong. He sent Balwant Singh with an urgent warning to the other returnees: stay away, and tell the others immediately!140 Meanwhile in Ferozepore the eight guides had already been discharged for seditious conduct. But rather than departing to their homes they stayed nearby, in contact with Kartar Singh. Around 9:00 p.m. he met fifty or sixty rebels who had arrived by train, and led them to the nearby rifle range to rendezvous with the guides. Along the way they managed to trick a patrol of territorials, called up for duty in response to the mutiny alert, into thinking they were just “an ordinary singing party,” since luckily one rebel had brought along a harmonium—“whether to accompany the singing of hymns or war songs is not known.”141 But the discharged sepoys did not appear; the revolutionaries waited until dawn and then dispersed. It turned out that the soldier whose task it had been to fetch his fellows was taken into custody before he could do so, and was held all night long for disobeying the order not to return.
Still loath to give up, about fifteen Ghadarites, including Harnam Singh and Balwant Singh, then took the train to Doraha bridge, intending to blow it up and attack the military guard there. But the guard was too strong to approach. They buried the bombs for safekeeping and planned to return later, but they never made it back. The bombs were eventually recovered by the police and were quite big enough, it was judged, to have done some serious damage.142
Sanyal, waiting in vain with his people on the parade ground at Varanasi for the go signal that never came, still had not heard the catastrophic news, until the evening papers came out, and he read, with horror and disbelief, what had happened.143 Back at the raided headquarters, Kartar Singh found Rash Behari Bose in a stupor of despair. Bose then fled to Japan, where he lived for the rest of his life. But the younger militant refused to give up until he was captured, along with Tundilat and ex-sowar Jagat Singh, still trying to subvert Jagat Singh’s old regiment, the Twenty-second Cavalry. “As might be expected of three such fire-brands,” said Isemonger and Slattery, they continued to “harangue the bystanders” even as they were arrested.144 Pingle hadn’t given up either; after fleeing Lahore he tried to carry through the planned rising at Meerut anyway, only to be caught there in March amid the lines of the Twelfth Cavalry, carrying, in O’Dwyer’s words, “a collection of bombs”—(actually a box of ten)—“sufficient to blow up a regiment.”145 Both Pingle and Jagat Singh were sentenced to death in the First Lahore Conspiracy Case.
Over the next days and weeks, the Lahore police swept up other conspirators, absconders, and incriminating materials, a process greatly expedited as Nawab Khan, Amar Singh, and Mula Singh turned approver, revealing detailed information on actions, methods, names of participants, homes, and meeting places. It was on their testimony that the conspiracy case largely rested. Contemporary documents revealed the magnitude of the colonial government’s panic, retroactively downplayed, at the closeness of their brush with disaster as bit by bit further details of the events came to light.
Clashes continued sporadically throughout the spring and summer of 1915 as those who had not yet been arrested “continued their revolutionary activities, spreading propaganda on the university campuses and in the military cantonments.”146 For example, even after the failed rising a couple of the Ghadarites had been teaching the indomitable sowars of the