Gadar Party

The Hindustan Gadar Party (alternatively spelled "Ghadar," or "Ghadr," meaning rebellion) was a San Francisco-based political organization founded in 1912 and made up primarily of Indian immigrants from Punjab. Founded by Har Dayal and Sohan Singh Bhakna, the organization formed with the aim of overthrowing British colonial rule of India through armed insurrection. On November 1, 1913, the Gadar Party published a newspaper titled "Ghadar" in Urdu, followed by a Gurmukhi edition in December that year. Copies of the newspaper as well as the party's pamphlets were disseminated throughout the world, including Japan, China, Hong Kong, Burma, and the Phillippines, eventually leading to Gadar Party bases set up in those areas. After facing arrest in 1914 for spreading anarchist literature, Har Dayal fled to Switzerland and appointed as editor of "Ghadar" a young Indian named Ram Chandra Bharadwaj (penname Ram Chandra), who assumed leadership of the party. In several of Chandra's editorials, which appeared in American newspapers, he wrote of the mistreatment of Indian immigrants in the U.S. The Gadar Party received considerable support from the German Foreign Office, which arranged funds and armaments in a plot to incite a pan-Indian revolution (later known as the "Annie Larsen affair") in 1915. The conspiracy was discovered by British and American intelligence, and led to the Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial of 1917, in which 29 party members were convicted in the District Court in San Francisco. Described in the press at the time as one of the longest and most expensive trials in U.S. history, the trial also made sensational headlines when Ram Chandra was assassinated by a rival Gadar Party member, Ram Singh, who was in turn shot by a court marshal.

The Gadar party continued to exist after the trial, and in 1920 began to publish the Independent Hindustan, a journal containing editorials, essays, and news items relating to the global movement for Indian independence. In 1923, the party began to publish The United States of India, for several years.

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