“The food on which the tender plant of liberty thrives is the blood of the martyr.”
– from Manifesto of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association On December 17th and 19th 1927, four revolutionaries, Ramprasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, Rajindernath Lahiri, and Roshan Singh, were executed by the colonial government. All four of them were members of the Hindustan Republican Association and were accused in the Kakori case. In 1922, after the Chauri Chaura incident, Gandhi declared an immediate stop to the Non-Cooperation movement without consulting any executive committee member of the Congress. In the Gaya Congress of 1922, youth leaders of Congress in the leadership of Ramprasad Bismil opposed Gandhi’s decision. When Gandhi refused to rescind his decision, they separated from Congress and organised themselves as the Hindustan Republican Association to bring a revolution and form a democratic republic. Ramprasad Bismil and Sachindra Nath Sanyal drafted the constitution of the party in 1923. The name, objective, and constitution of the organisation were typed on a Yellow Paper and a subsequent Constitutional Committee Meeting was conducted on October 3, 1924, at Kanpur under the chairmanship of Sachindra Nath Sanyal. On January 1, 1925, HRA issued a pamphlet ‘The Revolutionary’ declaring that they would continue their struggle not only to overthrow the colonial rule, but till there was an end to the ‘exploitation of man by man’. The pamphlet said, “The immediate object of the revolutionary party in the domain of politics is to establish a federal Republic of United States of India by an organized and armed revolution. The final constitution of this Republic shall be framed and declared at a time when the representatives of India shall have the power to carry out their decisions. But the basic principles of this Republic will be universal suffrage and the abolition of all systems which make the exploitation of man by man possible, e.g. the railways and other means of transportation and communication, the mines, and other kinds of very great industries such as the manufacture of steel and ships all these shall be nationalised. In this Republic the electors shall have the right to recall their representatives if so desired, otherwise the democracy shall become a mockery. In this Republic, the legislature shall have the power to control the executives and replace them whenever necessity will arise.” Soon HRA became popular among the youth due to its revolutionary acts and criticism of the opportunist policies of Congress. On August 9, 1925, the HRA revolutionaries stopped the Number 8 Down Train travelling from Shahjahanpur to Lucknow at Kakori and broke the government treasure box carrying an amount of Rs 4679 to raise badly needed resources for the revolutionary activities and to collect funds for procuring arms and ammunition. The British government cracked down brutally and managed to arrest most of the participants. The trial was manipulated as the colonial government was bent on giving death sentences. In jail, they protested and started hunger strikes to improve the conditions of political prisoners and oppose other various injustices. Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, and Thakur Roshan Singh were hanged on December 19, 1927, and Rajendra Lahiri two days earlier on December 17, 1927. Sachindranath Sanyal and Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee got life imprisonment, while 11 others got various terms in jail. Only Chandrashekhar Azad and Kundan Lal Gupta escaped arrest. This was a big blow to the HRA, but it recovered due to the great efforts of Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh. Bhagat Singh who returned to Lahore before Kakori Train Action, started political work there and set up the Lahore branch of the HRA. In Lahore, Bhagat Singh along with Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Sukhdev, and Ram Krishan formed a militant youth organization called the Naujawan Bharat Sabha (NBS) in March 1926. Ram Krishan was elected its president and Bhagat Singh its secretary. The Naujawan Bharat Sabha was a mass organisation of HRA to carry out political work among the youth, peasants, and workers. Also HRA was renamed as Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) in a meeting held at Firoz Shah Kotla on 8th and 9th September 1928, as suggested by Bhagat Singh and passed by the central committee of HRA, to reflect the party’s determination to form a Socialist state like the Soviet Union. These efforts of Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad, and others restrengthened the organization. When the death sentence was passed against the Kakori convicts and even before, there was a surge of public sympathy. There were widespread protests against the court’s decision. The Kakori martyrs became a legend throughout India. Bhagat Singh, who was fast emerging as a leading revolutionary at the time of the execution of the four Kakori revolutionaries, paid rich tributes to them in his articles in ‘Kirti’. In Ram Prasad Bismil’s words, “The making of nations requires the self-sacrifice of thousands of obscure men and women who care more for the idea of their country than for their own comfort or interest, their own lives or the lives of those whom they love.” The Kakori martyrs were the great example of self sacrifice.
