Alfred Park
Chandrashekhar Azad, the commander the police never caught, and the twenty minutes that closed the line
On the morning of 27 February 1931 the commander in chief of the HSRA held a police cordon in Alfred Park, Allahabad, from behind a jamun tree, and used his last round on himself rather than be taken. This lesson goes back from that morning to the Benares courtroom where a fifteen-year-old gave his name as Azad, through Kakori and the five and a half years no policeman could find him, and forward to the pistol now in a glass case at the Allahabad Museum. It closes the book on the armed line of 1911 to 1930.
The Tree in Alfred Park
It is the morning of Friday, 27 February 1931. Alfred Park in Allahabad is a wide public ground of lawns and jamun trees, the kind of place where clerks walk and children play. A little before ten, two men are sitting on the grass near one of the trees, talking quietly.
One of them is Sukhdev Raj, a young party worker. The other is a short, heavily built man of twenty-four with a thick moustache. He has been commander in chief of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association for two and a half years. In ten years of police work against him, across four provinces, he has never once been arrested.
A car stops at the edge of the park. Policemen get down. A voice calls across the grass.
The man beside the jamun tree takes out a Colt pistol. There is a fixed number of rounds in it and no way to get more. He already knows how the next twenty minutes will end, because he has thought about this morning for years and has told his comrades what he would do. His name, the one he gave a magistrate when he was fifteen, is Azad. It means free.
The Boy Who Answered the Magistrate
He was born on 23 July 1906 at Bhavra, a village in the small state of Jhabua in central India. His family had come there from Badarka in Unnao district, in the United Provinces, and his father worked as a gardener. He grew up among the Bhil tribal families of the area. The story his comrades repeated about him is that he learned to shoot a bow there, years before he held a gun.
In 1921 Gandhi's Non-cooperation Movement reached Benares, where the boy had been sent to study Sanskrit. He was about fifteen. He joined a demonstration, and the police picked him up with the rest.