Hindu–German Conspiracy
[19] At the time of the partition of Bengal, Shyamji Krishna Varma founded India House in London and received extensive support from notable expatriate Indians including Madam Bhikaji Cama, Lala Lajpat Rai, S. R. Rana, and Dadabhai Naoroji.Under V. D. Savarkar's leadership, the House rapidly developed into a centre for intellectual and political activism and a meeting-ground for radical revolutionaries among Indian students in Britain,[23][24][25] earning it the moniker "The most dangerous organization outside India" from Valentine Chirol.The joint efforts of Mohammed Barkatullah, S. L. Joshi and George Freeman founded the Pan-Aryan Association — modelled after Krishna Varma's Indian Home Rule Society — in New York in 1906.[31] This Irish collaboration with Indian revolutionaries led to some of the early but failed efforts to smuggle arms into India, including a 1908 attempt on board a ship called the SS Moraitis which sailed from New York for the Persian Gulf, before it was searched at Smyrna.The arrival at this time of Har Dayal from Europe bridged the gap between the intellectual agitators in New York and the predominantly Punjabi labor workers and migrants in the west coast, and laid the foundations of the Ghadar movement.Oppenheim and Arthur Zimmermann, the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs of the German Empire, actively supported the Berlin committee, which had links with Jatin Mukherjee— a Jugantar Party member and at the time one of the leading revolutionary figures in Bengal.[42] Ghadar leaders like Barkatullah and Tarak Nath Das used the inflammatory passions surrounding the Komagata Maru event as a rallying point and successfully brought many disaffected Indians in North America into the party's fold.[51] Later in 1915, Abani Mukherji— a Jugantar activist and associate of Rash Behari Bose— is also known to have tried unsuccessfully to arrange for arms from Japan.The ascendancy of Li Yuanhong to Chinese Presidency in 1916 led to negotiations reopening through his former private secretary, who resided in the United States at the time.The German military attaché Captain Franz von Papen acquired $200,000 worth of small arms and ammunition through Krupp agents, and arranged for its shipment to India through San Diego, Java, and Burma.These rebellious acts, which were until then organised separately by different groups, were brought into a common umbrella under the leadership of Rash Behari Bose in North India, V. G. Pingle in Maharashtra, and Sachindranath Sanyal in Benares.[19] In April 1915, unaware of the failure of the Annie Larsen plan, Papen arranged, through Krupp's American representative Hans Tauscher, a second shipment of arms, consisting of 7,300 Springfield rifles, 1,930.3 pistols,[dubious – discuss] ten Gatling guns and nearly 3,000,000 cartridges.[15][76] To provide the Bengal group enough time to capture Calcutta and to prevent reinforcements from being rushed in, a mutiny coinciding with Jugantar's Christmas Day insurrection was planned for Burma with arms smuggled in from neutral Thailand.Santokh Singh returned to Shanghai tasked to send two expeditions, one to reach the Indian border via Yunnan and the other to penetrate upper Burma and join with revolutionary elements there.Led by the exiled Indian prince Raja Mahendra Pratap, this mission sought to invite the Afghan Emir Habibullah Khan to break with Britain, declare his independence, join the war on the Central side, and invade British India.In the Middle Eastern theatre, members of the Berlin Committee, including Har Dayal and M. P. T. Acharya, were sent on missions to Baghdad and Syria in the summer of 1915, tasked with infiltrating the Indian Expeditionary Force in southern Mesopotamia and Egypt and to attempt to assassinate British officers.[96] These groups carried out successful clandestine work in spreading nationalist literature and propaganda amongst the Indian troops in Mesopotamia, and on one occasion even bombed an officer's mess.A British agent named Donald Gullick was dispatched to assassinate Virendranath Chattopadhyaya while the latter was on his way to Geneva to meet Mahendra Pratap to offer him Kaiser Wilhelm II's invitation.[33] Following this, several approaches were adopted, including infiltration through an Indian national named Bela Singh who successfully set up a network of agents passing on information to Hopkinson, and through the use of the famous American Pinkerton's detective agency.An Indian operative, codenamed "C" and described most likely to have been the adventurous Chandra Kanta Chakravarty (later the chief prosecution witness in the trial), also passed on the details of the conspiracy to British and American intelligence.In contrast to the mass executions in India, the Indian nationalists convicted in the San Francisco trial received prison terms ranged from 30 days to 22 months, as they faced far less serious charges of violating U.S. neutrality laws.[104] Alarmed at the agile organisation, which repeatedly reformed in different parts of the country despite being subdued in others, the chief of Indian Intelligence Sir Charles Cleveland was forced to warn that the idea and attempts at pan-Indian revolutions were spreading through India "like some hidden fire".[136][137][138] The events of the conspiracy during World War I, the presence of Pratap's Kabul mission in Afghanistan and its possible links to the Soviet Union, and a still-active revolutionary movement especially in Punjab and Bengal (as well as worsening civil unrest throughout India) led to the appointment of a Sedition committee in 1918 chaired by Sidney Rowlatt, an English judge.Michael O'Dwyer is said to have been of the firm belief that these were the early and ill-concealed signs of a conspiracy for a coordinated uprising around May, on the lines of the 1857 revolt, at a time when the British would have withdrawn to the hills for the summer.[150] James Houssemayne Du Boulay is said to have ascribed a direct relationship between the fear of a Ghadarite uprising in the midst of an increasingly tense situation in Punjab, and the British response that ended in the massacre.The first investigations were opened in America with the raid of the Wall Street office of Wolf von Igel, which resulted in seizures of papers that were later presented as evidence in the Hindu–German Conspiracy Trial.[152][153][154] The conspiracy issue was ultimately addressed by William G. E. Wiseman, head of British intelligence in the United States, when he passed details of a bomb plot directly to the New York Police bypassing diplomatic channels.[34][160] Although the conspiracy failed during World War I, the movement being suppressed at the time and several of its key leaders hanged or incarcerated, several prominent Ghadarites also managed to flee India to Japan and Thailand.The concept of a revolutionary movement for independence also found a revival amongst later generation Indian leaders, most notably Subhas Chandra Bose who, towards the mid-1930s, began calling for a more radical approach towards colonial domination.[161][162] Bose himself, from the very beginning of World War II, actively evaluated the concept of revolutionary movement against the Raj, interacting with Japan and subsequently escaping to Germany to raise an Indian armed force, the Indische Legion, to fight in India against Britain.[32][173][174][175][176] The term Hindu–German Conspiracy is closely associated with the uncovering of the Annie Larsen plot in the United States, and the ensuing trial of Indian nationalists and the staff of the German Consulate of San Francisco for violating American neutrality.
Anushilan SamitiIndian NationalismMilitant nationalismBankim Chandra ChattopadhyaySwami VivekanandaSister NiveditaAurobindo GhoshShakta philosophyIndian National CongressBipin Chandra Pal1905 Partition of BengalBande MataramJugantarM. C. SamadhyayiHistoryDhaka Anushilan SamitiAurobindoRaja Subodh MallikPramathanath MitraSarala DeviC.R. DasSurendranath TagoreKanailal DuttaJatindra Nath BanerjeeBarin GhoshPulin Behari DasBhupendranath DattaBagha JatinAtulkrishna GhoshJadugopal MukherjeeRash Behari BoseBhupendra Kumar DattaHemchandra KanungoUllaskar DuttaKhudiram BosePrafulla ChakiTarak Nath DasAbhinash BhattacharyaGuran Ditt KumarNaren BhattacharyaBhavabhushan MitraBipin Behari GanguliSachindra Nath SanyalJogesh Chandra ChattopadhyayPratul Chandra GanguliHindustan Republican AssociationNarendra Mohan SenNiranjan SenguptaM. N. RoyJatin DasSurya SenPritilata WaddedarAlipore Bomb ConspiracyHowrah-Sibpur ConspiracyDelhi–Lahore ConspiracyBarisal ConspiracyRodda robberyAnnie LarsenChristmas Day plotKakori conspiracyChittagong armoury raidSir Andrew FraserDepartment of Criminal IntelligenceSir Harold StuartSir Charles Stevenson-MooreSir Robert NathanJohn WallingerIndia HouseParis Indian SocietyAbhinav Bharat SocietyV.D. SavarkarMadam CamaHar DayalGhadar PartyAnarchism in BangladeshSocialism in BangladeshAsian and Pacific theatreWorld War ITsingtaoFanningNew GuineaBita PakaPacific IslandsPapeeteMadrasHonoluluPenangCoronelNorth-WestPeshawarMohmandMahsudsKelantanSingaporeMás a TierraCentral AsiaBeijingGerman TientsinHankouAustro-Hungarian TientsinGerman and Austro-Hungarian Pekingseditious conspiracyIndian nationalistBritish EmpireIndian revolutionary undergroundIndian independence committeeGerman Foreign OfficeSan FranciscoOttoman TurkeyIrish republican movementmutinyBritish Indian ArmyPunjabIndian subcontinentFebruary mutinyGhadariteallianceAnnie Larsen affairLahore conspiracy caseHindu–German Conspiracy TrialIndian independence movementWorld War IISoutheast AsiaSubhas Chandra BoseIndische LegionIndian National Army