The Kakori Conspiracy and the HRA/HSRA

After Chauri Chaura: Why the Gun Came Back

By Narendra Singh · GS faculty, The Cavalier · 15 years teaching GS

In February 1922 a crowd at Chauri Chaura burnt a police station, and Gandhi called off the Non-Cooperation Movement. Young men who had left their colleges at his call were left with no programme, and many concluded that non-violence had failed. Our page on the Gandhian national movement covers the mass phase that this one follows.

The new current had a different centre from the Bengal societies of before 1915 (see Anushilan and Jugantar). It ran through the United Provinces, Punjab and Delhi. A key text was Bandi Jivan ("A Life of Captivity", 1922), the memoir of Sachindranath Sanyal, a veteran of the Ghadar-era conspiracies. Its pages inspired many of the young men who followed him.

After an all-India conference of revolutionaries at Kanpur, the Hindustan Republican Association was founded in October 1924 to organise an armed revolution. Sanyal, Ram Prasad Bismil and Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee were its leading organisers, and Ashfaqulla Khan, Rajendra Lahiri and Roshan Singh joined soon after. Its aim was a federal republic of the United States of India, and its aim was social too: an end to the exploitation of man by man. In the first days of January 1925 the HRA distributed a printed manifesto titled "The Revolutionary", written mainly by Sanyal, in cities across northern India. It set out the aim of a federal republic and spoke of ending every system that lets one person exploit another. That social aim is why historians treat the HRA as a step towards the later socialism of the HSRA.

Like every underground party, the HRA needed money for arms. Seizing government cash was the decision that led to Kakori.

Kakori, 9 August 1925: The Train Action

On the night of 9 August 1925, a party of about ten HRA members stopped the Number 8 Down train, which was travelling from Shahjahanpur to Lucknow, near the small station of Kakori, a few miles from Lucknow. One of them pulled the alarm chain. The group overpowered the guard and took the bags of government cash. The planners were Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqulla Khan, and the party included Rajendra Lahiri, Chandrashekhar Azad, Sachindra Bakshi, Manmath Nath Gupta and others. A passenger was killed by a stray shot, which made it a murder case.

Within weeks the police had arrested much of the HRA. About forty people were tried before a special court at Lucknow from May 1926. The sessions court gave its verdict on 6 April 1927, and the Chief Court upheld the death sentences on four men in August. As Bipan Chandra puts it, seventeen were given long terms of imprisonment, four were transported for life and four, including Bismil and Ashfaqulla, were hanged.

Chandrashekhar Azad was never arrested. He had joined the movement as a teenager after being whipped by a magistrate for his part in Non-Cooperation, and he gave his name as "Azad" (free) in court. He escaped, rebuilt the shattered HRA and became its military leader.

Sachindranath Sanyal, who had founded the party, was not at Kakori. He had been arrested earlier for the manifesto, was charged in the Kakori case as well, and was sentenced to transportation for life. The HRA's top layer was thus gone in a single blow.

1928: The Association Turns Socialist

The HRA had almost no leaders left. Azad, with younger recruits from Punjab, and above all Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev from the Naujawan Bharat Sabha at Lahore, took over the work. On 8-9 September 1928 revolutionaries from the United Provinces, Punjab, Rajasthan and Bihar met in the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi. They renamed the party the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA). Chandrashekhar Azad became its commander-in-chief. The word "Socialist" was the point of the meeting, and Bhagat Singh was its main advocate. The renaming recorded the socialist turn that Bipan Chandra notes among the young revolutionaries.

The Simon Commission reached India in February 1928 and was met with a country-wide hartal. At Lahore, on 30 October 1928, police lathi-charged a procession led by Lala Lajpat Rai, who died on 17 November 1928. The HSRA decided that the insult to the "Lion of Punjab" had to be answered. On 17 December 1928, Bhagat Singh and Rajguru shot John Saunders, an assistant superintendent of police, outside the police headquarters in Lahore, with Azad covering their escape. The intended target is usually named as Scott, the officer who had ordered the lathi charge, and Saunders was shot by mistake. Posters next morning accepted responsibility, regretting the loss of a life but calling the officer part of an unjust order.

1929: The Assembly Bomb, the Court and the Philosophy of the Bomb

On 8 April 1929, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi, onto empty benches, as the Public Safety Bill and Trade Disputes Bill were being discussed. They shouted "Inquilab Zindabad" and threw leaflets. The bombs had been made deliberately harmless. The leaflet said that the aim was not to kill but to make the deaf hear. Both men could have escaped and chose to be arrested, so that they could use the trial as a platform for their ideas.

The trial changed the HSRA's public image. Police traced the bomb workshops and the Saunders connection, and the government began the Lahore Conspiracy Case against Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru and others. In jail the prisoners demanded the treatment due to political prisoners, such as proper food, books and newspapers, and went on hunger strike. Jatin Das (Jatindranath Das), a young man who had advised the group on explosives, died on 13 September 1929 after a fast of about 63 days. His funeral procession drew huge crowds, and his death moved the public more than any speech.

The HSRA also took part in a public debate. After an attempt to blow up the Viceroy's train in December 1929, Gandhi wrote an article called "The Cult of the Bomb" in Young India, criticising revolutionary violence. The HSRA replied with a manifesto, "The Philosophy of the Bomb", written by Bhagwati Charan Vohra and issued in the HSRA's name. It argued that the bomb was a means to wake an unarmed country and that the aim was a revolution of the masses. Vohra died in May 1930 while testing a bomb on the bank of the Ravi. In 1930 Bhagat Singh also wrote the essay "Why I Am an Atheist" in jail.

1931: The Last Chapter

The tribunal gave its verdict on 7 October 1930, and Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were hanged at Lahore on 23 March 1931. The Gandhi-Irwin Pact had been signed on 5 March, and many Indians expected Gandhi to win a commutation. He pleaded with the Viceroy for it but could not make it part of the pact. The Congress session at Karachi, held days after the executions under Sardar Patel, paid tribute to the courage of the three while keeping its distance from their methods. Bipan Chandra records that the three wrote a few days earlier that the final battle would begin very soon, and affirmed their faith in socialism in their last letters.

A month earlier, on 27 February 1931, Chandrashekhar Azad was surrounded by police at Alfred Park, Allahabad. He fought until his last bullet and shot himself, keeping his vow never to be taken alive. With Azad dead and the other leaders hanged or in jail, the HSRA ended. The Chittagong Armoury Raid of April 1930 under Surya Sen was a separate conspiracy, not part of the HSRA.

The revolutionaries won no military victory. What they changed was the tone of Indian politics: their courtroom defiance exposed the regime's harshness, and their open socialism put land and labour on the nationalist agenda. In the 1930s the Congress Socialist Party (1934) and Nehru's call for socialism at the 1936 Lucknow session carried the same current into the Congress itself. For the broader sweep, from the 1857 aftermath to the Azad Hind Fauj, see our page on the revolutionary struggle and the INA.

How UPSC Has Asked It: Past Papers Solved

These are real questions from UPSC papers. CDS and NDA ask about this strand in short factual forms: who wrote it, who founded it, which date. Two of the questions below are from the CAPF paper, which draws on the same syllabus.

Practice MCQs (with answers)

1. The Hindustan Republican Association was founded in October 1924 at
   1. Lahore
   2. Kanpur
   3. Calcutta
   4. Delhi
2. Chandrashekhar Azad was the commander-in-chief of the
   1. Anushilan Samiti
   2. Ghadar Party
   3. Hindustan Socialist Republican Association
   4. Indian National Army
3. Which Kakori martyr was hanged on 17 December 1927, two days before the others?
   1. Ram Prasad Bismil
   2. Ashfaqulla Khan
   3. Roshan Singh
   4. Rajendra Nath Lahiri
4. The HRA was renamed the HSRA at a meeting held in
   1. September 1928 at Feroz Shah Kotla
   2. August 1925 near Kakori
   3. April 1929 at the Central Assembly
   4. March 1931 at Karachi
5. Which statement about the Assembly bomb of 8 April 1929 is correct?
   1. It was meant to kill the Viceroy
   2. The bombs were deliberately harmless, and the two men courted arrest to use the trial for propaganda
   3. It was thrown by Chandrashekhar Azad and Rajguru
   4. It was thrown during the Kakori trial at Lucknow
6. Jatin Das died in Lahore jail in September 1929 after a hunger strike of about
   1. 21 days
   2. 42 days
   3. 63 days
   4. 100 days
7. "The Philosophy of the Bomb" was written as a reply to
   1. Tilak's Gita Rahasya
   2. Nehru's Discovery of India
   3. the Simon Commission report
   4. Gandhi's article "The Cult of the Bomb"
8. Chandrashekhar Azad died in a police encounter in 1931 at
   1. Alfred Park, Allahabad
   2. Cellular Jail, Port Blair
   3. Chittagong
   4. Amritsar

Quick Revision