Bhagat Singh, the HSRA and the Chittagong Armoury Raid: Revolutionary Nationalism (1924‑1934)

Revival of Revolutionary Nationalism After Non-Cooperation

Disillusionment After Chauri Chaura and the Turn to Arms

The revival began with the sudden end of the Non-Cooperation Movement. Many revolutionaries released under a general amnesty in early 1920 had joined Gandhi's programme or suspended their activities to give it a chance. When Gandhi called off the movement after the violence at Chauri Chaura in February 1922, many of these young nationalists were left disillusioned. They were not drawn to the council work of the Swarajists or to the slow constructive work of the No-changers, and they turned to the idea that violent methods alone would free India.

Nearly all the leaders of the new phase had been active in Non-Cooperation, among them Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, Surya Sen, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagwati Charan Vohra and Jatin Das. New influences shaped their thinking:

• Russian Revolution: The revolution of 1917 and the survival of the Soviet state showed that an armed rising could succeed.
• Working-class movement: The rise of trade unions after the First World War suggested a new class that could be drawn into a national revolution.
• Communist and socialist groups: Newly formed groups spread Marxist ideas of class and of the proletariat among the young.
• Revolutionary literature: Memoirs, journals and novels praised the self-sacrifice of earlier revolutionaries; Bandi Jiwan by Sachindra Nath Sanyal was one such book.

Two Strands of the Armed Movement: North India and Bengal

The movement ran in two separate strands. The first worked across Punjab, the United Provinces and Bihar and was led by the HRA and later the HSRA. The second worked in Bengal, where the older groups regrouped and new "revolt groups" formed, the most famous of them Surya Sen's group at Chittagong.

The two strands shared a method of armed action and personal sacrifice but differed in organisation. The north Indian strand built a single association with a written manifesto and, after 1928, a socialist programme. Many Bengal revolutionaries continued to work under the Congress, which gave them access to the masses and gave the Congress an organisational base in towns and villages. The Bengal groups grew out of the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar of the earlier revolutionary phase.

Hindustan Republican Association and the Kakori Train Robbery (1924‑1927)

Founding of the HRA at Kanpur in 1924

The Hindustan Republican Association was founded at Kanpur in October 1924 by Ram Prasad Bismil, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee and Sachindra Nath Sanyal. It drew on the example of the Ghadar Party, which Indian migrants in North America, among them Lala Hardayal, had founded. Its aim was an organised armed revolution to overthrow colonial rule and set up a "Federal Republic of the United States of India", whose basic principle would be adult franchise.

The HRA soon set up branches at Agra, Allahabad, Benares, Kanpur, Lucknow, Saharanpur and Shahjahanpur. Sanyal wrote its manifesto, The Revolutionary, distributed in the cities of north India on 1 January 1925. Alongside the call for a republic, the manifesto already carried a socialist aim, the abolition of "all systems which make any kind of exploitation of man by man possible". Sanyal was arrested at Bankura in Bengal while sending out copies, and Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee was caught by the police at Howrah railway station, near Calcutta.

Kakori Train Robbery and the Kakori Conspiracy Case

The Kakori train robbery was the most important action of the HRA. On 9 August 1925 a group led by Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan and Chandrashekhar Azad stopped the Number 8 Down train at Kakori, a village near Lucknow, and took the government money it carried. The money was meant to buy arms for the association.

The government answered with a massive crackdown. In the Kakori Conspiracy Case that followed, Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Roshan Singh and Rajendra Lahiri were sentenced to death and hanged in December 1927, and many others were sent to prison for long terms. The four became popular heroes through their defiance at the trial. Azad alone among the principal leaders escaped arrest. In his last days Bismil appealed to the young to give up conspiracies and work in an open movement, to strengthen Hindu-Muslim unity and to unite under the Congress. Kakori was a heavy setback, but it did not end the north Indian strand.

Hindustan Socialist Republican Association and the Socialist Turn (1928)

The Feroz Shah Kotla Meeting of September 1928

The younger revolutionaries, inspired by socialist ideas, set out to rebuild the movement after Kakori. Revolutionary groups from Punjab, the United Provinces, Bihar and Bengal met in the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi on 8 and 9 September 1928 and renamed the HRA the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. The change of name probably owed most to Bhagat Singh's influence. The participants included Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Bhagwati Charan Vohra from Punjab and Bejoy Kumar Sinha, Shiv Verma and Jaidev Kapur from the United Provinces, with Chandrashekhar Azad as commander-in-chief.

The HSRA decided to work under a collective leadership and adopted socialism as its official goal. Its aim was now not only to end British rule but to build a socialist India, and it spoke of a revolution by the masses to establish "the dictatorship of the proletariat". The name is sometimes expanded as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army; Association is the usual form.

In March 1926, two years before the Kotla meeting, Bhagat Singh had helped found the Naujawan Bharat Sabha in Punjab, an open wing of the revolutionaries that carried political work to the youth, peasants and workers. Two of the six rules he drafted for it required members to have nothing to do with communal bodies and to spread a general feeling of tolerance, treating religion as a matter of personal belief.

The Saunders Killing at Lahore (December 1928)

The killing of John Saunders followed the death of Lala Lajpat Rai. On 30 October 1928 Lajpat Rai led a peaceful protest against the Simon Commission at Lahore, and the police beat the protesters with lathis on the orders of the Superintendent of Police, James Scott. Lajpat Rai died on 17 November 1928, and the HSRA leaders resolved to avenge him.

Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev and Azad planned to kill Scott. On 17 December 1928, in a case of mistaken identity, Bhagat Singh and Rajguru shot dead Saunders, a young Assistant Superintendent of Police, outside the district police headquarters in Lahore. Azad's covering fire killed Head Constable Chanan Singh, who was chasing them. The next day the HSRA put up posters in Lahore claiming that Lajpat Rai had been avenged. The act drew the HSRA back to individual assassination just when its leaders had begun to move away from it.

Central Legislative Assembly Bomb and the Lahore Conspiracy Case (1929‑1931)

The Assembly Bomb of 8 April 1929: "To Make the Deaf Hear"

The Central Legislative Assembly bomb of 8 April 1929 was meant to announce the HSRA's new aims to the whole country. Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Datta (also written Dutt) threw two low-intensity bombs from the public gallery onto empty benches of the Assembly in Delhi while it was in session. The bombs were made to cause no deaths, and the two men stayed to be arrested, shouting "Inquilab Zindabad" and throwing leaflets whose message was "to make the deaf hear".

The bombs were timed as a protest against the Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Bill. The protest did not stop either measure. The Trade Disputes Act, 1929, made Courts of Inquiry and Consultation Boards compulsory for settling industrial disputes and made strikes in public utility services such as posts, railways, water and electricity illegal unless each worker gave a month's notice. It also forbade trade union activity of a coercive or purely political nature, and even sympathetic strikes.

The HSRA's purpose was to use the trial as a platform for its ideas. Bhagat Singh and Datta were sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1929. Bhagat Singh was then tried for the Saunders killing along with Sukhdev, Rajguru and others in what became the Lahore Conspiracy Case.

The Jail Hunger Strike and the Death of Jatin Das

The hunger strike of 1929 began as a protest against the treatment of Indian prisoners. In jail Bhagat Singh saw that European prisoners received better food, clothing and reading material than Indians. He and his comrades demanded to be treated as political prisoners, with equal food and clothing, books and a daily newspaper, and freedom from degrading labour. The government made some concessions but refused to recognise a class of "political prisoner".

Jatin Das (Jatindra Nath Das), a member of the HSRA arrested in June 1929 for making the Assembly bombs, joined the strike on 13 July 1929 in Lahore jail. He died on 13 September 1929, after two months on hunger strike.

His body was taken by train from Lahore to Calcutta, thousands of people came to the railway stations to pay homage, and in Calcutta Subhas Chandra Bose led the funeral procession. Two members of the Punjab Legislative Council resigned in protest, and the Central Assembly carried a censure motion against the treatment of the Lahore prisoners. Bhagat Singh ended his own strike on 5 October 1929, after 116 days, at the request of the Congress and his father. The strike made him a household name in Punjab, and his popularity spread far beyond it.

Special Tribunal and the Executions of 23 March 1931

Bhagat Singh was hanged because a special tribunal found him guilty of the Saunders killing. To speed up the slow trial, the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, issued an ordinance on 1 May 1930 that set up a tribunal of three High Court judges, from whose verdict the only appeal lay to the Privy Council in London. The accused stayed away from the court, and the judgement was given in their absence. On 7 October 1930 the tribunal found Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru guilty of the killing and sentenced all three to death; seven others were sentenced to transportation for life. The Privy Council dismissed the appeal.

The executions came in the middle of the truce between the Congress and the government. The Gandhi-Irwin Pact of 5 March 1931 provided for the release of political prisoners except those guilty of violence, so it did not cover the three. Gandhi pleaded with Irwin for commutation, but the Viceroy refused. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru were hanged in Lahore jail on 23 March 1931, a day before the date fixed for the execution; they were 22 to 23 years old. Their bodies were secretly cremated on the bank of the Sutlej near Hussainiwala in Ferozepur district.

The hangings took place on the eve of the Karachi session of the Congress. Angry youths met Gandhi with black flags, and the Congress passed a resolution that disapproved of political violence in any form while placing on record its admiration of the bravery and sacrifice of the three.

Chandrashekhar Azad and the Decline of the HSRA

On 23 December 1929 a bomb planted by Azad and Vohra went off under Lord Irwin's special train near Delhi; the Viceroy escaped unhurt. The HSRA then lost its leaders one by one. Vohra was killed in Lahore on 28 May 1930 while testing a bomb meant for a rescue of Bhagat Singh and his comrades, and an attempt to revive the association at a meeting in Meerut in December 1930 failed.

Chandrashekhar Azad, the HSRA's commander-in-chief, was surrounded by the police at Alfred Park in Allahabad on 27 February 1931 and shot himself during the gunfight that followed. After Azad's death no central leader remained, and the HSRA broke into regional groups acting without central direction.

Bhagat Singh's Ideas: Socialism, Secularism and Revolution by the Masses

From the Bomb to Revolution by the Masses

Bhagat Singh's thought changed the meaning of revolution for the armed stream. Even before his arrest he had moved away from belief in individual heroic action towards Marxism and the view that only a broad popular movement could make a successful revolution, "by the masses, for the masses". He used to say that "real revolutionary armies are in villages and factories". His comrades chose propaganda by deed, together with the courtroom as a platform, because they had not yet built that mass base and faced the problem of how to mobilise people and recruit them.

In court he set out what revolution meant to him: "Revolution does not necessarily involve sanguinary strife, nor is there a place in it for personal vendetta. It is not the cult of bomb and pistol." The goal was national liberation and, beyond it, a socialist order that would end the "exploitation of man by man". He held that peasants had to free themselves from landlords and capitalists as well as from foreign rule, and that the struggle would continue as long as a handful of exploiters lived on the labour of the people, whether they were British or Indian. He defined socialism as the abolition of capitalism and of class domination.

Secularism, Atheism and the Debate with Gandhi

Bhagat Singh was consciously secular. The Hindu-Muslim riots that followed the end of Non-Cooperation convinced him that religion divided those who should be united against British rule. In Lahore jail in 1930 he wrote the essay Why I Am an Atheist in reply to friends who said his atheism came from vanity; in it he explained that he had grown up religious and had reached atheism through reading and reflection. The essay was published on 27 September 1931, six months after his execution, in The People, which Lala Lajpat Rai had founded.

The armed stream also argued openly with Gandhi. After the attempt on Irwin's train, Gandhi condemned the revolutionaries in an article, The Cult of the Bomb, warning that violence would bring more repression and could turn against Indians themselves. Bhagwati Charan Vohra, in consultation with Azad, replied with The Philosophy of the Bomb, the best-known statement of the revolutionary position, which defended armed action and appealed to the young to join.

Surya Sen and the Chittagong Armoury Raid (1930)

Revolutionary Groups in Bengal During the 1920s

Many Bengal revolutionaries of the 1920s stayed inside the Congress and worked with C. R. Das in the Swaraj Party. In 1924 the regrouped societies tried to kill the Calcutta Police Commissioner, Charles Tegart, and the government replied with a new ordinance and mass arrests. After Das died in 1925 the Bengal Congress split into two factions, one led by J. M. Sengupta, with whom the Anushilan group joined, and the other led by Subhas Chandra Bose, backed by the Jugantar group. Repression and factional quarrels weakened the old groups, and new "revolt groups" took their place.

The Chittagong Armoury Raid of 18 April 1930

The Chittagong armoury raid was led by Surya Sen, known as Masterda. A schoolteacher in the national school at Chittagong, he had taken part in Non-Cooperation, was imprisoned from 1926 to 1928 for revolutionary activity, and was secretary of the Chittagong District Congress Committee. He used to say that "Humanism is a special virtue of a revolutionary." With Ananta Singh, Ganesh Ghosh and Lokenath Bal he planned a rising to show that the armed might of the Empire could be challenged.

The raid was carried out on the night of 18 April 1930 by about 65 activists under the banner of the Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch. Surya Sen's plan had four parts:

• Armouries: Capture the two main armouries in Chittagong, of the police and of the Auxiliary Forces, and supply their arms to the revolutionaries.
• Communications: Destroy the telegraph and telephone office and cut the rail and communication lines, so that Chittagong was cut off from Calcutta.
• European Club: Take members of the European Club as hostages.
• Funds and prisoners: Loot the Imperial banks at Chittagong for money for further risings, and free jailed revolutionaries.

The raiders took both armouries and cut the telephone and telegraph wires, but they could not find the ammunition, and few members were at the European Club because it was Good Friday. Outside the police armoury Surya Sen took a military salute, hoisted the national flag and proclaimed a Provisional Revolutionary Government. The group then withdrew into the hills. On 22 April 1930 troops surrounded them on the Jalalabad hills near the Chittagong cantonment, and over 80 troops and 12 revolutionaries were killed in the fight.

Surya Sen scattered his men into the villages and carried on raids against government targets for nearly three years. He was arrested on 16 February 1933 at Gairala village after an informer betrayed him, and was hanged on 12 January 1934 together with Tarakeswar Dastidar.

The government's reply was severe. Under 20 repressive Acts the police were given a free hand against the revolutionaries; in Chittagong several villages were burned and punitive fines were imposed on many others. Between 1930 and 1932, 22 officials and 220 others were killed by revolutionaries in separate incidents. Yet the raid fired the imagination of young Bengalis, and recruits poured into the revolutionary groups.

New Features and Limits of the Bengal Phase After 1930

The Bengal revolutionaries of the 1930s worked differently from the earlier groups. They chose group action against the organs of the colonial state in place of individual killings, aiming to set an example to the young and to demoralise the bureaucracy. They shed much of the earlier Hindu religiosity and its oath-taking rituals, which made it easier for Muslims to join; Surya Sen's group included Satar, Mir Ahmed, Fakir Ahmed Mian and Tunu Mian. The best-known group action outside Chittagong came on 8 December 1930, when Benoy Basu, Badal Gupta and Dinesh Gupta of the Bengal Volunteers entered the Writers' Building in Calcutta and shot dead N. S. Simpson, the Inspector General of Prisons.

The movement also had clear weaknesses. It never worked out broader social and economic goals, and those who worked with the Swarajists failed to support the Muslim peasantry of Bengal against the zamindars.

Women Revolutionaries of Bengal

Pritilata Waddedar, Kalpana Dutt and the Chittagong Group

A large number of young women joined the Bengal revolutionaries, especially under Surya Sen. They gave shelter, carried messages and arms, and fought with guns in their hands. Many came through women students' associations such as the Chhatri Sangha in Calcutta.

Pritilata Waddedar, a philosophy graduate of Bethune College who had become a headmistress in Chittagong, joined Surya Sen's group. On 24 September 1932 she led an armed attack on the Pahartali European Club; one woman was killed and several people were wounded. Wounded herself and about to be caught, she swallowed potassium cyanide, as the group had planned. She is often called Bengal's first woman martyr.

Kalpana Dutt (also written Datta) joined the Indian Republican Army in May 1931. In September 1931 Surya Sen chose her, with Pritilata, for a planned attack on the European Club in Chittagong, but she was arrested while surveying the area a week before it was due. Released on bail when the charges were not proved, she went underground; she escaped when Surya Sen was captured at Gairala in February 1933, was arrested again on 19 May 1933, and was sentenced to transportation for life in the Chittagong Armoury Raid Case. Released in 1939, she later joined the Communist Party of India.

The Comilla Schoolgirls and Bina Das

Two schoolgirls of Comilla, now in Bangladesh, carried out one of the boldest attacks of the period. On 14 December 1931 Shanti Ghosh and Suniti Chowdhury, both members of the Chhatri Sangha and the Jugantar group, entered the office of the District Magistrate, Charles Stevens, and shot him dead with pistols hidden under their shawls. They were tried in Calcutta in February 1932 and sent to prison.

Bina Das, a student of Calcutta University, fired five shots at the Governor of Bengal, Stanley Jackson, at the university's convocation on 6 February 1932, but missed. In her confession she said she wanted to free her country from the "perpetual subjection to its infinite shame and endless suffering" caused by British rule. She was sentenced to nine years of rigorous imprisonment.

Revolutionary Nationalism and the Strands of the National Movement

Ideological Strands of the 1920s and the Wider Social Base

The 1920s were the decade in which the national movement split into several ideological currents, each drawing in new groups of people. Beside the Gandhian mass movement and the council work of the Swarajists, new forces appeared:

• Left wing in the Congress: Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, inspired by the Russian Revolution, called for complete independence and joined nationalism to social justice; the Congress adopted complete independence as its goal at Lahore in December 1929.
• Communists: Communist groups and workers' and peasants' parties spread Marxist ideas, and the government arrested 31 communists, trade unionists and left-wing leaders in 1929 for the Meerut Conspiracy Case.
• Youth and students: Students' leagues and conferences spread across the country; Nehru presided over the All Bengal Students' Conference in 1928.
• Peasants and workers: Peasant agitations over rents and evictions, and major strikes in 1928 involving 5 lakh workers, brought new classes into politics.
• Revolutionary nationalists: The HSRA and the Bengal groups added an armed strand with a turn towards socialism.

The revolutionary strand widened the social base of nationalism in its own way. It drew in students and young people through the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, and it brought schoolgirls and women graduates into armed action in Bengal. Its trials and hunger strikes stirred people who never joined it. Thousands came to honour Jatin Das's body on its way to Calcutta, and hartals and strikes of mourning followed the executions of 1931. Through Bhagat Singh's writings it carried the language of class and socialism to a wide audience.

Revolutionaries, Gandhi and the Congress: Sympathy Without Approval

The Congress rejected the revolutionaries' methods but honoured their courage. Gandhi condemned their violence as harmful to the movement, yet he pleaded for the lives of Bhagat Singh and his comrades. Congress leaders organised the defence of the young revolutionaries in court, and the Karachi session of 1931 admired their sacrifice while disapproving of political violence.

The revolutionaries, for their part, drew closer to mass politics. Azad met Nehru a few weeks before his death to ask whether the talks between Gandhi and Irwin might end his status as an outlaw, and Nehru recorded that Azad and many of his associates had come to see the futility of their methods, though Azad was not sure that peaceful methods would work either. Several survivors later turned to the communist movement, among them Kalpana Dutt. Shanti Ghosh and Suniti Chowdhury were released in 1939 after amnesty negotiations between Gandhi and the colonial authorities, and Kalpana Dutt was released the same year after efforts by Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

Decline of the Revolutionary Movement and Its Assessment

The movement was largely spent by the mid-1930s. Several causes worked together:

• Repression: Special tribunals, ordinances and many repressive Acts allowed the government to hang, imprison and transport the revolutionaries.
• Loss of leaders: By 1934 Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Azad, Vohra and Surya Sen were dead, and no new centre held the groups together.
• Narrow base: Small secret groups could inspire the young but could not organise peasants and workers in large numbers.
• Change of ideas: Bhagat Singh's own turn to revolution by the masses, and the move of survivors to communism and open politics, took the energy of the movement away from secret armed groups.

The achievement of the revolutionaries was moral and political rather than military. They kept alive a spirit of defiance, turned courtrooms and prisons into platforms, and through Bhagat Singh gave nationalism a socialist and secular vision whose legacy many later movements have claimed. Their limit was their method. A few armed groups could not defeat the state; Bhagat Singh himself came to see that only a mass movement could succeed.

Their memory remains strong. The National Martyrs Memorial at Hussainiwala marks the spot where Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were cremated, and Batukeshwar Datta, who died on 19 July 1965, was cremated there at his own wish. Since 2022 the Biplobi Bharat Gallery at the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata has displayed the contribution of the revolutionaries and their armed resistance to colonial rule.

Sources

• NCERT: Exploring Society: India and Beyond, Grade 8, Book 2, Chapter 2, India's Long Road to Independence
• NCERT: India and the Contemporary World II, Class 10, Chapter 2, Nationalism in India
• Press Information Bureau: Prime Minister pays tribute to Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev on Shaheed Diwas, 23 March 2026
• Press Information Bureau: PM inaugurates Biplobi Bharat Gallery at Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, 23 March 2022
• New India Samachar: 16‑31 March 2026 issue, Surya Sen, Hero of the Chittagong Armoury Raid
• New India Samachar: 16‑31 July 2022 issue, Kalpana Dutta, a Revolutionary Woman
• District Administration Ferozepur: The National Martyrs Memorial, Hussainiwala Border
• Wikipedia: Hindustan Socialist Republican Association
• Wikipedia: Kakori conspiracy
• Wikipedia: Bhagat Singh
• Wikipedia: Chandra Shekhar Azad
• Wikipedia: Jatindra Nath Das
• Wikipedia: Lahore Conspiracy Case trial
• Wikipedia: Naujawan Bharat Sabha
• Wikipedia: Bhagwati Charan Vohra
• Wikipedia: Why I Am an Atheist
• Wikipedia: Gandhi-Irwin Pact
• Wikipedia: Chittagong armoury raid
• Wikipedia: Surya Sen
• Wikipedia: Pritilata Waddedar
• Wikipedia: Kalpana Datta
• Wikipedia: Santi Ghose
• Wikipedia: Suniti Choudhury
• Wikipedia: Bina Das
• Wikipedia: Dinesh Gupta
• Wikipedia: Lakshmi Sahgal
• Wikipedia: Abhinav Bharat Society
• Wikipedia: Anushilan Samiti
• Wikipedia: Satguru Ram Singh
• Wikipedia: Vasudev Balwant Phadke
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers