Kartar Singh Sarabha was 19 when he was executed by the British colonial Raj on 16 November 2015. Sarabha’s legacy inspired Bhagat Singh, who used to carry a photo of Sarabha in his pocket at all times.
Kartar Singh was born in Sarabha, a Punjabi village near Ludhiana, to a Grewal Jat Sikh family. Mangal Singh Grewal was his father, and Sahib Kaur was his mother. When his father died when he was young, he was raised by his grandfather. Following his primary schooling in his village, Singh enrolled in the Malwa Khalsa high school in Ludhiana, where he studied through the eighth grade. Then he travelled to Odisha to visit his uncle (father’s brother) and stayed for nearly a year.
Sarabha took off for San Francisco in July 1912, hoping to study at the University of Berkeley. However, it appears that, like many other Punjabis, he began working as a labourer in the California countryside. At the time, North America was unfriendly to Asian immigration, and their presence sparked widespread animosity. Soon after, the immigrants formed a group to share their problems and talk about what they were going through. Sarabha became politicised as a result of this process. Sarabha, like many Indians in the United States, was acutely aware of his captivity as a member of a subject race. The liberation of India from the British rule was seen as a means of restoring Indians’ honour and dignity as a nation.
Indian employees in Oregon and Washington formed an organisation in March 1913 to fight for their rights. Lala Hardayal addressed a series of gatherings in California around the same period, in May-June 1913, that created the groundwork for a movement. Ghadar is the name given to the movement.
The Ghadar newspaper soon took off, at first in Urdu in November 1913 and from December onwards in Punjabi, owing to Sarabha’s efforts. Besides writing the Punjabi text, Sarabha also operated the handheld machine to churn out copies of the publication for distribution.
In May-June 1914, the Komagata Maru incident took place in neighbouring Canada. This radicalised the Ghadarites further. On 28 July 1914, much earlier than the Ghadarites expected, the armed confrontation that would snowball into the First World War began in Europe. The Ghadar issue of 4 August 1914 then published a call to arms: ‘O Warriors! The opportunity you have been looking for has arrived.
By the end of October, eight ships left the USA and Canada towards India. Among the returnees was Kartar Singh Sarabha who landed in Colombo and made his way to Punjab.
When World War I broke out in 1914, British India became deeply involved in the Allied war effort. The leaders of the Ghadar Party, seeing an opportunity, published the “Decision of Declaration of War” against the British in the 5 August 1914 issue of ‘The Ghadar.’ The paper was disseminated in thousands of copies throughout army cantonments, villages, and cities. In October 1914, Kartar Singh arrived in Calcutta aboard the SS Salamin, together with two other Ghadar commanders, Satyen Sen and Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, and a huge number of Gadhar independence fighters. Singh and Pingle met Rash Behari Bose in Banaras with a letter of introduction from Jatin Mukherjee, the Jugantar chief, to inform him that 20,000 more people had been added.
Betrayal-Kirpal Singh, a police informer in the ranks of the Ghadar Party, had a large number of members arrested on 19 February and informed the government of the planned revolt. The government disarmed the native soldiers and the revolt failed.
All of these accused in the Conspiracy Case, for India’s freedom who had worked long years and suffered privations and sacrificed everything that man runs after, were executed in the Lahore Central Jail on 17 November 1915.
LEGACY
Bhagat Singh was inspired by him. “On Bhagat Singh’s arrest, a photo of Sarabha was recovered from him. He always carried this photo in his pocket. Very often, Bhagat Singh would show me that photograph and say, ‘Dear mother, this is my hero, friend and companion.’ ” – Bhagat Singh’s mother
(SOURCE FIRST POST)
