Lala Har Dayal

Lala Har Dayal was an Indian nationalist and scholar who was general secretary of the Ghadar Party when it was formed in the United States in 1913. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says that after his arrest in 1914 he was sent to Switzerland and took no further part in the Ghadar movement. How much of the party's credit belongs to him is a matter of dispute.

Key moments

• 14 October 1884: born in Delhi. He studied Sanskrit at St Stephen's College, Delhi, and Punjab University, and won Oxford scholarships (Wikipedia).
• 1911: after travelling through Europe he reached Berkeley at the start of the year and began organising Indian immigrants against British rule. On 27 December 1911 he was one of twelve Hindus at a meeting of Punjabis in the Stockton region that the Sikh managers of the Holt Farm had called. The meeting agreed to build a gurdwara at Stockton and raised five thousand dollars (Gurdev Singh Sidhu).
• 1912 to 1913: he was asked to take over as general secretary of the Hindustani Association of the Pacific Coast, formed at Portland in 1912, when G. D. Kumar fell ill. In May 1913 the association decided to open a Ghadar Ashram, also called Yugantar Ashram, and to form a Ghadar party headquartered in San Francisco. Its officers included Sohan Singh Bhakna as president, Kesar Singh as vice-president and Har Dayal as general secretary. The first issue of the Ghadar weekly appeared in Urdu in November 1913, and a Punjabi edition followed a few weeks later (Encyclopaedia of Sikhism).
• 1913: Kartar Singh Sarabha, a Berkeley student, left his studies and worked with him on the Ghadar newspaper (Encyclopaedia of Sikhism).
• 16 March 1914: US immigration authorities arrested him for deportation. He skipped bail and went to Switzerland, then to Berlin, where he helped form the Berlin Committee (Wikipedia). The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says the party secured his release on bail and sent him to Switzerland.
• 1927 to 1939: refused permission to return to India, he stayed in London, where he received a doctorate in 1932. He died in Philadelphia on 4 March 1939 (Wikipedia).

The dispute over credit: Gurdev Singh Sidhu argues that British intelligence and the Lahore conspiracy trials treated Har Dayal and Bhai Parmanand as the leaders of the movement, that being English-educated they drew the attention of the American press, and that this left the Sikh farmers and workers who kept the movement going out of the story. He says his argument does not reduce Har Dayal's part in organising the party.

Remembered for: being the Ghadar Party's general secretary and intellectual voice at its start, and for how short his stay was: the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says he took no further part in the movement after his 1914 arrest.