The Philosophy of the Bomb

Bhagwati Charan Vohra, who answered Gandhi in print and died on the Ravi

On 28 May 1930 a bomb went off in Bhagwati Charan Vohra's hand on the bank of the Ravi, during a test for a plan to break Bhagat Singh out of Lahore jail. He was the HSRA's writer: the Naujawan Bharat Sabha manifesto was his, and so was The Philosophy of the Bomb, the reply to Gandhi's The Cult of the Bomb. This lesson sets both texts side by side in their own words.

The Bank of the Ravi

It is the afternoon of Wednesday, 28 May 1930. Outside Lahore, the Ravi runs low and brown in the heat before the rains. Three men have taken a boat across to the scrub and trees on the far bank, where nobody walks and nothing can be heard from the road.

One of them is Bhagwati Charan Vohra, twenty-six years old, the son of a railway officer whose loyalty to the British had earned him the title Rai Bahadur in 1919. With him are Yashpal, who will later become one of the best known novelists in Hindi, and Sukhdev Raj. They have a bomb they built themselves and one question to answer. Will it go off when it is supposed to?

They need to know because of a plan. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar and Rajguru are in Lahore Central Jail, on trial before a special tribunal that the Viceroy had set up by an ordinance on 1 May. There is no appeal from it. The HSRA has decided to try to take them out by force, and bombs are the only tool it has.

Vohra pulls the pin. The bomb goes off in his hand before he can throw it. His hand is gone and his stomach is torn open. Sukhdev Raj, hit in the foot by a splinter, runs for help. Vohra lives a few hours more and dies on the sand.

Four months earlier he had put out a piece of writing that answered the most famous man in India by name. This is the story of what he wrote, who he was arguing with, and why both of them thought they were right.

The Rich Boy from National College

Vohra was born in Lahore on 15 November 1903. The family was comfortable and the family was loyal. That was normal for people in his father's line of work, and it makes what the son did next harder to explain by circumstance.