Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna

Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna was the first president of the Ghadar Party, the revolutionary movement of Punjabi migrants on the Pacific coast of America. The Tribune says he was born on 4 January 1870, and the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism says at Khutrai Khurd, his mother's village near Amritsar, the only son of Bhai Karam Singh, a Shergill Jatt of Bhakna village. He learned Punjabi and the basics of the Sikh faith at the village gurdwara, took part in the agitation of 1906 to 1907 against the Colonization Bill, and left for the United States on 3 February 1909. He reached Seattle on 4 April and worked as a labourer in a timber mill nearby.

The Encyclopaedia says that in summer 1913 a meeting at Stockton formed the Hindustani Workers of the Pacific Coast, with Bhakna as president and Lala Har Dayal as general secretary. Its entry on the Ghadr movement dates the association to Portland in 1912, so the sources differ on where and when the party began; the Ghadar Party page sets them side by side. The weekly Ghadar first appeared on 1 November 1913 and gave the party its name. The Tribune says he became the first president of the Ghadar Party in 1913. At Yokohama he met the returning Komagata Maru and handed a consignment of arms to Baba Gurdit Singh. When war broke out he sailed for India.

Key moments

• 13 October 1914: arrested on arrival at Calcutta, then interrogated at Ludhiana and held at Multan.
• 1915: tried in the first Lahore Conspiracy Case and sentenced to death with 23 others. The Tribune says Motilal Nehru argued that 17 of the 24 could not be sentenced to death because they were arrested at the ports before setting foot on Indian soil, and that Viceroy Lord Hardinge commuted those 17 sentences, Bhakna's among them. Seven comrades, among them Kartar Singh Sarabha, were hanged. On 16 November 1915, the Tribune says, Bhakna was weighed for the gallows before the execution was postponed.
• 10 December 1915: reaches the Andamans and goes on hunger strike more than once for better treatment of the prisoners.
• June 1928: hunger strike in Lahore Central Jail against the segregation of Mazhabi Sikhs at meals.
• Early July 1930: released, nearly 16 years after his arrest.
• After release: organised Kisan Sabhas, was interned at Deoli for nearly three years in the Second World War, and after Independence moved towards the Communist Party of India.
• 21 December 1968: died at Amritsar.

Remembered for: Leading the Ghadar Party at its start, surviving the gallows, and fighting in prison for Sikh prisoners' turbans and for the equal treatment of Mazhabi Sikhs at meals. His memoir, Jeewan Sangram, tells the story, and the Tribune says he lived with regret that Sarabha and others were hanged while he was spared.