Alongside the satyagrahis marched another India — of bombs and pistols, of secret societies and a legion raised on a foreign shore — that kept the alternative of force before the Raj.
§1The Secret Societies
Bengal led: the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar bred a generation of young men who swore on the Gita and the bomb; Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki threw a bomb at Muzaffarpur (1908) killing two Englishwomen instead of their target — the eighteen-year-old Khudiram went to the gallows smiling and entered Bengali memory as its innocent martyr. In Maharashtra, Savarkar's Abhinav Bharat and, abroad, the Ghadar party of Lala Har Dayal (1913) among Punjabi emigrants in North America tried to turn the First World War into India's opportunity.
§2The HSRA and Bhagat Singh
The second wave organised as the Hindustan Republican Association, anchored by Chandrashekhar Azad; its first act was the Kakori train robbery (1925). Reborn as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, it assassinated Saunders to avenge Lala Lajpat Rai's death, and on 8 April 1929 Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw harmless bombs and leaflets in the Central Legislative Assembly 'to make the deaf hear', then stood trial as propaganda.
Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged on 23 March 1931 — a date India still mourns as Shaheed Diwas; Bhagat Singh, who read Lenin and read Bakunin, was twenty-three, and his pamphlet 'Why I Am an Atheist' remains among the most read essays of the Indian left. In Bengal, Surya Sen ('Masterda') seized the Chittagong armoury in 1930 with a band of schoolboys and held the town for days before dying in 1934.
§3The Indian National Army
The last act was played overseas. From the Indian prisoners of the Japanese came the INA, first raised by Mohan Singh and Rash Behari Bose; in 1943 Subhas Chandra Bose — 'Netaji', who had escaped house arrest in Calcutta and travelled by submarine to Southeast Asia — took command of the Azad Hind Fauj at Singapore, formed the Provisional Government of Azad Hind, raised the Rani of Jhansi Regiment of women, and gave the army its salutation: 'Jai Hind'. 'Give me blood, and I will give you freedom,' he promised.
The INA fought beside the Japanese at Imphal and Kohima in 1944; when Japan fell, the army dissolved and Bose died in an air crash at Taipei (18 August 1945). The real insurrection came after: the INA trials at the Red Fort (1945–46) convulsed India — Congress, League and Akalis united in the defence — and in February 1946 the Royal Indian Navy mutinied at Bombay. The Raj's last prop, the loyalty of its Indian soldiers, had snapped.
End of Chapter 25 · Volume III