AFTERMATHS
The rebels were tried under the Defense of India Act in a series of twelve special tribunals with no possibility of appeal. The main trial lasted from April to September 1915, followed by four supplementary cases, and several subsidiary cases between July 1915 and September 1918.148 Of the 64 accused in the initial case, the results were 2 discharged, 4 acquitted, 24 sentenced to death, 27 to transportation for life, and 6 to lesser prison terms; commuted to a total of 7 executions, 34 life sentences, and 16 shorter terms.149 In total 175 people were tried, resulting in 136 convictions, including 42 death sentences, though about half of these were commuted to transportation for life.150
Official postmortems continually cited Ghadar’s fatal disconnection from the sentiments of the countryside, whose denizens, authorities liked to claim (just as Ghadarites liked to deny), were generally “loyal and contented,”151 sure in a crunch to “rall[y] stoutly on the side of law and order.”152 And yet it may stand as a testament to the Ghadarites’ persuasiveness, that 121 of 231 defendants tried in all of the conspiracy cases in Punjab were local residents rather than returned emigrants.153 When the returnees of 1914–15 set out “to inform their kinsmen of the unequal treatment that was meted out to them” overseas, they did so by “preach[ing] the doctrines of revolution that they had learned from the Ghadr and the crude socialism that they had picked up in the towns of western Canada and the United States.”154 Once the Ghadar community consciousness was dominated by a mass of workers, rather than by an elite intellectual secret-society network, a left ward evolution seems logical enough.
Before leaving on their doomed campaign, the party hard core in California had had the foresight to elect “a new collective to carry on the work” in their absence, with an executive committee consisting of Bhagwan Singh as president, Santokh Singh as general secretary, Ram Chandra as manager of the paper, and Gobind Behari Lal as editor, plus ten other Yugantar Ashram staffers.155 Yet there were intimations of increasing disunity and ugly factional strife. Ram Chandra had taken over editorship of the Ghadar after Har Dayal’s departure in April 1914, and officially changed its name to Hindustan Ghadar in a deliberate move to deflect the persistent taint of anarchism linked to the name of Har Dayal. (Restricting revolt to Hindustan signaled that they had a specific grievance against British rule in India but posed no threat in principle to regimes elsewhere.) As the war gathered momentum key figures scattered to various tasks: Barakatullah to Berlin, and Bhagwan Singh to Manila, Tokyo, and Panama.156 With his two cohorts gone, Ram Chandra was the dominant figure in San Francisco. It appeared to the informer identified in reports as C that Ram Chandra had taken over from Har Dayal and now reigned “supreme,” exercising “autocratic control” of the Yugantar Ashram, assisted in the work by “a few Indians of the educated middle class, such as Gobind Behari Lal,” plus “a large number of Indians of the lower classes chosen apparently from among the more intelligent of the coolies. These ‘poor people’, as C called them, lived in the Ashram without wages, lithographing the Ghadar, and performing other functions.”157
The working-class collective members involved in a labor of love might have been surprised to hear themselves described that way. Nor did they meekly accept Ram Chandra’s autocratic and secretive behavior. He was drawing increasing criticism for his lack of transparency in accountability for German funds, as well as for his political views. There were accusations that he had appropriated thousands of dollars of the “national fund” for his personal use. Furthermore, many considered the new emphasis on German and Turkish interests in the Ghadar publications—at the expense of India’s own—to be a betrayal of the integrity of their own goals. Many had had their doubts about the German alliance in the first place; these enemies of the enemy were not their friends, just another racist and imperialist power no more to be trusted than Britain beyond immediate strategic interest. Added to this were the corrosive actions of provocateurs and informants, with pervasive distrust leading to the murders of several suspected traitors.
C’s true identity was Sagar Chand, a student from Lahore who had come to England in 1909, where he got involved with the India House “extremists” through a friend. The friend was Haider Raza, an India House habitué, Krishnavarma scholarship holder, and Chand’s tutor in Persian and logic. C attributed the failure of his academic career at Oxford and the Middle Temple to “the life of dissipation” into which Haider Raza had “initiated him.”158 He remained an obscure figure until 1914, when he started writing seditious articles for papers in Punjab and energetically distributing the Ghadar, which his many “lady friends” helped him to post. In reality he had been feeding intelligence on the India House inner circle to the DCI from the beginning, having “lived a false life for over a year and won the confidence of the men he was hunting.”159 When he arrived in the United States, after making contact with Freeman and Gobind Behari Lal, he managed to allay Heramba Lal Gupta’s suspicions about him sufficiently to make his way into Ram Chandra’s inner circle in San Francisco, from where he passed detailed information to British intelligence.160
When Bhagwan Singh returned to California in October 1916 he was horrified at what he found, and resolved to reconvene the “real” Ghadar movement. He embarked on a campaign against Ram Chandra, and by February 1917 there were dual organizations printing dual papers. Ram Chandra claimed legal rights to the name Hindustan Ghadar, but Bhagwan Singh declared that his challenger, Yugantar, was the more genuine successor to the spirit of the original Ghadar.161 Judging by the issues and excerpts available, he was correct. For example, the first number of the new Hindustan Ghadar said its purpose was to “disseminate general education, knowledge, culture and science,” without mentioning revolution, India’s freedom, or any of the other key planks of its predecessor.162 The content of Yugantar, on the other hand, was very much like that of the earlier paper.163
The schism between these two leaders has sometimes been portrayed as a case of Hindus versus Sikhs. As played out in personal loyalties, this may have occurred in effect; in 1917 the Stockton and Vancouver Khalsa Dewans united to denounce Ram Chandra—whose alleged embezzling, and the death and imprisonment of mutineers, were now equated with “Hindu leadership”—and declare their opposition to the Ghadar Party in defense of Sikh orthodoxy.164 Yet the Ghadarite Sikhs portrayed their own party as a secularist, rationalist alternative to the Khalsa Dewan. Perhaps more than anything else, the difference was between moderates and radicals; between aspiration to the values of the American mainstream as actually practiced—even unto adopting its racialist categories and markers of socioeconomic success—or in their idealized form, venerating in principle the libertarian texts legible to early twentieth-century radicals of any provenance, such as the Declaration of Independence. One aimed to acquire land in America; the other to liberate land in India. In short, there were two different expressions of nationalism, depending on whether the focus of identification, as well as the chosen