Lahore Conspiracy Case trials of Ghadr men

Who: Ghadr men, many of them Sikh, who came back to India after the First World War began, and a special tribunal of three judges, one of them Indian, set up under the Defence of India Act. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says government records show 2,312 Ghadr men entered India between October 1914 and February 1915, and more than 8,000 by 1916.

What: The Lahore conspiracy cases were the trials of the Ghadr party's men. The party's executive met on 12 February 1915 and fixed a rising for 21 February, to seize the Mian Mir and Ferozepur cantonments, then Meerut and Delhi. When news leaked, the date was moved to 19 February, but the informer Kirpal Singh told the police that too. Police raided the party's headquarters at four places in Lahore and arrested 13 men, and arrests followed across Punjab. The encyclopaedia says the rebellion was smashed before it had taken shape, though it lists the Singapore mutiny of 15 February among the army units that came out in the open.

The trial of the first batch began on 26 April 1915, in the Central Jail, Lahore, and the trials ran in batches into 1916. The first case ended with death sentences for 24 men, among them Sohan Singh Bhakna, according to The Tribune, and the encyclopaedia dates Kartar Singh Sarabha's death sentence to 13 September 1915. The Tribune says Motilal Nehru argued that 17 of the 24 had been arrested at ports before setting foot on Indian soil and could not be sentenced to death, and that the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, commuted those 17 sentences, Bhakna's among them. Seven were hanged, including Sarabha and Vishnu Ganesh Pingle; the encyclopaedia dates Sarabha's hanging to 16 November 1915. Bhakna was transported to the Andamans and released in 1930.

Across all the cases the encyclopaedia says 291 people were tried: 42 were sentenced to death, 114 transported for life, 93 given terms of imprisonment and 42 acquitted. Property was confiscated in many cases and no one appealed. Wikipedia says 42 of 291 were executed. It calls the 291 convicted, though its own breakdown includes 42 acquitted, which matches the encyclopaedia's 291 tried. The sources therefore differ on whether 42 were sentenced to death or hanged. The Tribune shows that death sentences were commuted (17 of the first 24), and its seven hanged is for the first case alone.

Where: Lahore, with the tribunal sitting in the Central Jail, Lahore, and arrests at Meerut and across Punjab.

Why it mattered: O'Dwyer, as the encyclopaedia quotes him, called the Ghadr movement "by far the most serious attempt to subvert British rule in India". The encyclopaedia says it gave the Akali movement that followed a few years later its nucleus, and that Ghadr leaders were especially prominent among the Babbar Akalis.