Back in Time is ED’s newspaper-like column that reports the past as though it had happened just yesterday. It allows the reader to relive it several years later, on the date it occurred.
9th August 1925
Revolutionaries Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, Chandrasekhar Azad, and many others today executed their plan to rob a train carrying money bags that originally belonged to the Indians.
Britishers had earned this money in form of taxes by force and torturing the Indian citizens, and were about to transfer it to their country, United Kingdom.
The revolutionaries first stopped the Number 8 down train near Kakori region in Uttar Pradesh which was on its way to Lucknow, and looted Rs. 8000 kept in the guard cabin.
The primary objective of the robbery was to gain funds for the newly formed Hindustan Republican Association, which came into existence with the motto of liberating the Indians from the atrocious handcuffs of the Britishers.
Immediately after looting the money bags, revolutionaries fled to Lucknow.
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Post Scriptum
Though the revolutionaries had not planned on targeting any passenger or Indian citizen, one passenger, who had gotten down to check on his wife, got killed during the crossfire between the train guards and the revolutionaries.
This gave the Britishers a chance to torture Indians and arrest them. Calling it a manslaughter case, the Britishers launched a manhunt to arrest all those involved in the Kakori Train incident.
Within a month, a dozen members of the Hindustan Republican Association were arrested, and 40 others were detained for conceiving and executing the conspiracy. On September 26, 1925, Ram Prasad Bismil was arrested by the British police. A year later, other masterminds behind the train robbery Ashfaqullah Khan and Shachindra Bakshi were also arrested.
The trial on the Kakori conspiracy case started in Lucknow on 21 May 1926 and the final verdict was pronounced in July 1927. Around 15 people were let off by the court for lack of evidence. Five people escaped during the trial. The court awarded death sentences to Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaq Ullah Khan, Thakur Roshan Singh, and Rajendra Lahiri.
The death sentence to revolutionaries evoked strong protests among the Indians which made the British rulers realize that if Indians are united, no force can break them.
Significantly, on August 9, 2021, the Uttar Pradesh government renamed the Kakori Conspiracy Case as “Kakori Action Day”. This was done because the term “conspiracy”, as called by the Britishers, makes the action, done by revolutionaries for our independence, look insulting.
Image Credits: Google Images
Feature image designed by Saudamini Seth
Sources: Indian Express, ANI, OpIndia
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