The lastchapter

The arrestSeven weeks after Kakori

The killing of a passenger on a public train guaranteed that the investigation would be pursued with the full resources of the colonial police. It moved quickly. Ram Prasad Bismil was arrested on 26 September 1925; a small number of sources give the date as 26 October. Arrests continued across the United Provinces and into Bengal until some forty people were in custody.

Those detained included men who had been nowhere near the train. The prosecution was framed as a conspiracy case, and a conspiracy charge reaches membership and association rather than only presence at an event. That framing is the single most important fact about what followed: it is what turned an incident on a railway line into a proceeding against an entire organisation.

The trialEighteen months in a Lucknow courtroom

Proceedings opened before the Special Sessions Judge A. Hamilton at Lucknow in May 1926 and continued for approximately eighteen months. The charges combined conspiracy against the Crown with the offences committed on the train, including the death of Ahmad Ali.

The accused were represented by a substantial body of counsel, several of whom were significant figures in Indian public life then or later: Govind Ballabh Pant, who would become the first Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and Union Home Minister; Mohanlal Saksena; Chandra Bhanu Gupta; Kripa Shankar Hajela; and others. Their willingness to appear is itself evidence of how the case was regarded — not as ordinary crime, but as a political prosecution in which the nationalist bar had a stake.

Ashfaqulla Khan was not among the original accused. He was arrested in December 1926, after the main trial was already well advanced, and was tried in a supplementary proceeding.

The appealsEvery route was taken, and every route closed

An appeal was carried to the Chief Court of Oudh on 18 July 1927. Judgment was delivered on 22 August 1927 and the death sentences were upheld.

What followed was a political campaign rather than a legal one, and it drew in nationalist leaders who rejected the revolutionaries' methods entirely. A mercy petition signed by seventy-eight members of the Central Legislature — among the supporters were Motilal Nehru, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Lala Lajpat Rai, Jawaharlal Nehru and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi — was submitted to the Viceroy. Lord Irwin rejected it on 9 September 1927.

A final appeal to the Privy Council in London was made in September 1927 and refused. An appeal to the King was also refused. The Government directed that the four sentences be carried out by 19 December 1927.

The final monthsWhat he did with the time

Bismil spent the last part of his life in the condemned cell at Gorakhpur, and he spent it writing. The autobiography he produced there was begun in prison and finished within days of the end. It left the jail in instalments and was published the following year by Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi from the Pratap Press at Cawnpore under the cover title Kakori ke Shaheed.

The book is the primary source for most of what is known about his childhood and his own account of his political decisions. That a man under sentence of death chose to spend his remaining time composing a careful narrative of his life — rather than a statement, a protest or a farewell — says something about him that no later characterisation improves on.

On 18 December 1927 his mother, Moolmati, came to the jail to see him. Accounts of the meeting record that he wept and that she did not. She is reported to have told him that she was proud of him. The exchange has been retold many times and in many forms; the fact of the visit on that date is well established, and this website reports the visit rather than any particular version of the words.

19 December 1927The four

The sentences were carried out in four different jails. Rajendra Nath Lahiri was hanged two days before the others.