ਬਾਬਾ ਸੋਹਣ ਸਿੰਘ ਭਕਨਾਬਾਬਾ ਸੋਹਣ ਸਿੰਘ ਭਕਨਾ

Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna (January 1870 to 20 December 1968) was the founding president of the Ghadar Party, the organisation of Punjabi migrants in North America that planned an armed rising against British rule in India during the First World War. Arrested in Calcutta in October 1914, he was tried in the First Lahore Conspiracy Case, sentenced to death, and saw the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. He served sixteen years in prison before his release in July 1930, then spent the rest of his long life organising Punjab's peasants, and died at Amritsar at 98.

Early life in Bhakna

He was born in January 1870 at Khutrai Khurd, his mother Ram Kaur's parental village, three kilometres northeast of Guru ka Bagh in Amritsar district. His father, Bhai Karam Singh, was a Shergill Jatt farmer of Bhakna, sixteen kilometres southwest of Amritsar, where Sohan Singh grew up as the couple's only son. No record of his exact date of birth survives: some sources give 4 January, others 22 January, and this entry uses January 1870. He learned Punjabi in the village gurdwara, and studied Urdu and Persian, finishing primary school at sixteen. He was married at ten to Bishan Kaur, daughter of Khushal Singh, a landlord of Jandiala in Lahore district. The couple had no children.

As a young man he came under the influence of Baba Kesar Singh, a Namdhari saint, whose example turned him toward a disciplined religious life. A memoir by Prem Singh Bajaj, who knew him, records that he gave up salt for twelve years and later sugar for a similar period. Farming proved hard for him, and like hundreds of young Punjabis of his generation he looked abroad for work. He had already taken part in the agitation against the Colonization Bill in Punjab in 1906 and 1907, the first sign of his political life.

America and the making of the Ghadar Party

On 3 February 1909 he left home for the United States, reaching Seattle on 4 April after a two-month journey. He found work as a labourer in a timber mill under construction near Seattle. In those years thousands of Punjabis, most of them Sikhs, had crossed to the Pacific coast of North America in search of work, and they met discrimination in both the United States and Canada, where laws limited their entry and their political rights. Their resentment fed a political movement among the migrants, led by students and exiled patriots such as Lala Har Dayal and Taraknath Das.

In the summer of 1913, representatives of Indians living in Canada and the United States met at Stockton, California, and set up the Hindustani Workers of the Pacific Coast, also called the Hindi Pacific Association. Sohan Singh Bhakna was elected its president and Lala Har Dayal its general secretary. On 1 November 1913 the association launched a weekly paper, Ghadar, meaning rebellion, from the Yugantar Ashram press in San Francisco. The paper's name passed to the organisation, which became the Ghadar Party. Its stated aim was an armed rising against British rule in India, beginning by winning over Indian soldiers. Among its members were Berkeley students, including the young ਕਰਤਾਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਸਰਾਭਾ, who edited the Punjabi edition of the paper.

The turning away of the Komagata Maru, a ship of Indian migrants Canada refused to admit in 1914, became a rallying point for the party. Sohan Singh met the returning ship at Yokohama and delivered arms to Baba Gurdit Singh, who had chartered it. On learning there that war had broken out in Europe on 28 July 1914, he sailed for India to organise the rising from inside the country.

The Ghadar Conspiracy and the Lahore trial

The party had planned its rising for 1917, but the war and the Komagata Maru affair hastened events, and its leaders began shipping arms and volunteers to India. Sohan Singh sailed for India in the SS Namsang to direct the rebellion from inside the country. British intelligence was already following the conspiracy, and as soon as his ship reached Calcutta on 13 October 1914 he was arrested. After a few days of interrogation at Ludhiana, he was sent to the Central Jail at Multan.

He was tried in the First Lahore Conspiracy Case and sentenced to death, with forfeiture of his property. Twenty-four men in the case were sentenced to death for waging war against the Crown. Sohan Singh refused to petition for mercy. A memoir account says seventeen of the twenty-four death sentences were commuted after the jurist Pandit Motilal Nehru pointed to a flaw in the case: the accused had been arrested from ships and had not set foot on Indian soil. Sohan Singh was among them. He reached the Andaman Islands on 10 December 1915, where he led hunger strikes for better treatment of the prisoners.

Sixteen years in prison

In the Andamans he led hunger strikes until the government appointed an enquiry commission and in 1920 stopped using the jail for political prisoners. In 1921 he was transferred to Coimbatore jail and then to Yervada, where he fasted in protest at Sikh prisoners being denied their turbans and kachhahira. In 1927 he was moved to Lahore Central Jail, where in June 1928 he fasted against the segregation of Mazhabi Sikhs at meals. It was in Lahore jail that he met Bhagat Singh and other young revolutionaries. In 1929, still in prison, he went on hunger strike in support of Bhagat Singh. He was released early in July 1930, having served sixteen years.

A memoir by Prem Singh Bajaj counts about twenty-six years of his life spent in prison in all. He was sixty when he walked free, and went straight back to political work.

Later life: peasants, prison again, and Partition

Early in 1931 he joined the Congress Civil Disobedience Movement and served a six-month jail term for it. Sharp differences with the Congress leaders over his work among peasants soon led him to leave the party. From then on he devoted himself to the peasants' movement, organising Kisan Sabhas across Punjab, and was elected president of the All India Kisan Sabha for the first time in 1934. During the Second World War he was interned at the Deoli Camp in Rajasthan for nearly three years.

After Independence he moved decisively toward the Communist Party of India. He was arrested on 31 March 1948 and released on 8 May 1948, then seized again, and his jail-going ended only at the intervention of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister. With Baba Jawala Singh he set up the Kirti Kisan Ashram, donating seventeen acres of land for the education of the destitute children of patriots who had died, and later gave land and money for a high school in his village. During the Partition of 1947 he saw to it that no Muslim life was lost in the area under his influence.

He spent his last years in a humble cottage at Bhakna, surrounded by green fields. His wife had died earlier and he had no children, but visitors found him contented and, in the words of the memoirist who spent two days with him in May 1966, young in spirit though bent with age. He died at Amritsar on 20 December 1968, after a brief illness, worn down by pneumonia. Some sources, including The Sikh Encyclopedia, give 21 December, the day of his funeral.

Why is Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna remembered?

He is remembered first as the founding president of the Ghadar Party, the man who gave an organisation to the anger of Punjabi migrants in North America and turned it into a movement that reached Punjab. He was the link between the labourers in the timber mills and the students at Berkeley, and he gave the young ਕਰਤਾਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਸਰਾਭਾ, whom he called Baba General, his place in the party. Sarabha was hanged at nineteen in the same Lahore Conspiracy Case in which Sohan Singh was sentenced to death.

He is remembered too for the second half of his life, as a peasant leader who carried the Ghadar spirit into the Kisan Sabha and the Communist Party of India without ever turning his faith into dogma. He told those who visited him in old age that the future of the country was safe with its enlightened youth, and that they must not stop until the goal was reached. In Punjab he is still called Baba, the elder, a title he earned twice over: as the president of the Ghadar Party and as a man who spent the best years of his life in prison and came out to work for the poorest.

He lived the sant sipahi ideal of the ਖਾਲਸਾ ਪੰਥ: prayer and service first, and resistance when the community's freedom was at stake. That ideal, taught by ਗੁਰੂ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ and carried by ਬਾਬਾ ਬੰਦਾ ਸਿੰਘ ਬਹਾਦਰ, runs through his life, from the timber mills of Seattle to the jails of the Andamans and the fields of Bhakna.