One Word Added at Feroz Shah Kotla
The night the HRA became the HSRA, and the seven people standing outside the famous photograph
On the nights of 8 and 9 September 1928, in the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, delegates from Lahore, Kanpur, the United Provinces, Bihar and Bengal added one word to their party's name and chose a commander. This scene-setter carries Bhagat Singh in full: Lajpat Rai's death, Saunders, the Assembly bombs, the trial and 23 March 1931. It then turns to the seven people the chapter is actually about.
The Ruins at Feroz Shah Kotla
It is the night of Saturday, 8 September 1928. In Delhi, on the bank of the Yamuna, stand the broken walls of a fort built in the fourteenth century by Feroz Shah Tughlaq. There is an old stone pillar in the middle of it. Around the pillar, in the dark, sit about a dozen young men.
They have come by train from Lahore, from Kanpur, from the United Provinces, from Bihar and from Bengal. Most of them are in their twenties. Some have false names on their tickets. They are carrying nothing that would look wrong in a student's bag, because a search would end everything.
They are here to rebuild a party that the Raj has already destroyed once. Three years ago, ten men stopped a train at Kakori and took the government cash from the guard's safe. The hangings that followed in December 1927 had taken Ram Prasad Bismil, Rajendra Lahiri, Roshan Singh and Ashfaqulla Khan. The Hindustan Republican Association was left with its founder in jail and almost no one at the top.
The meeting runs into the next day, Sunday, 9 September. Two decisions come out of it. The first is a name. The party will add one word to the old one and become the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. The second is a command. A man from the Kakori years who has never once been caught is made commander in chief.
The man is Chandrashekhar Azad. The word is Socialist. The young man who argued hardest for the word is a twenty-year-old from a village near Lyallpur, and within a year the whole country will know his name.
The Word They Added
The word mattered more than it sounds.
The old Hindustan Republican Association had one aim: throw the British out and set up a republic. What came after that was left open. The men at Feroz Shah Kotla wanted it closed. They had read about the Russian revolution of 1917. They had watched the strikes in the Bombay mills. They had decided that a free India run by the same landlords and the same mill owners was not what they were going to die for.