Ghadar Movement

Ghadar Party
President	Sohan Singh Bhakna
Founded	15 July 1913; 110 years ago (15 July 1913)
Dissolved	January 1948; 76 years ago (January 1948)
Ideology	Indian independence Indian nationalism
Colours	Red, Saffron, Green
Politics of India Political parties Elections

The Ghadar Movement or Ghadar Party was an early 20th-century, international political movement founded by expatriate Indians to overthrow British rule in India.^[1] Many of the Ghadar Party founders and leaders, including Sohan Singh Bhakna, would go on and join the Babbar Akali Movement and would help it in logistics as a party and publishing its own newspaper in the post-World War I era.^[2] The early movement was created by revolutionaries who lived and worked on the West Coast of the United States and Canada, but the movement later spread to India and Indian diasporic communities around the world. The official founding has been dated to a meeting on 15 July 1913 in Astoria, Oregon,^[3] and the group would splinter into two factions the first time in 1914, with the Sikh-majority faction known as the “Azad Punjab Ghadar” and the Hindu-majority faction known as the “Hindustan Ghadar.”^[4] The Azad Punjab Ghadar Party’s headquarters and anti-colonial newspaper publications headquarters would remain in the Stockton Gurdwara located in Stockton, California, whereas the Hindustan Ghadar Party’s headquarters and Hindustan Ghadar newspaper would relocate to be based in nearby Oakland, a suburb of San Francisco, California.^[4]

Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, some Ghadar party members returned to Punjab to incite armed revolution for Indian Independence. Ghadarites smuggled arms into India and incited Indian troops to mutiny against the British. This uprising, known as the Ghadar Mutiny, was unsuccessful, and 42 mutineers were executed following the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial. From 1914 to 1917 Ghadarites continued underground anti-colonial actions with the support of Germany and Ottoman Turkey, known as the Hindu–German Conspiracy, which led to a sensational trial in San Francisco in 1917.

Following the war's conclusion, the party in the United States fractured into a Communist and an Indian Socialist faction. The party was formally dissolved in 1948.^[1] Key participants in the Ghadar Movement included K. B. Menon, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Mewa Singh Lopoke, Kesar Singh(Vice-President), Baba Jawala Singh(Vice-chair), Balwant Singh, Santokh Singh, Bhai Parmanand, Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, Har Dayal, Tarak Nath Das, Bhagat Singh Thind, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Udham Singh, Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barakatullah, Rai Nawab Khan, Rashbehari Bose, and Gulab Kaur. Although its attempts at overthrowing the British Raj were unsuccessful, the insurrectionary ideals of the Ghadar Party influenced members of the Indian Independence Movement opposed to Gandhian nonviolence. To carry out other revolutionary activities, "Swadesh Sevak Home" at Vancouver and United India House at Seattle was set-up.^[5]