The Kakori train action
Kakori, near Lucknow
On 9 August 1925 Hindustan Republican Association members stop a train at Kakori and seize government cash; four of them are hanged in December 1927.
The Hindustan Republican Association, founded in 1924 by Sachindra Nath Sanyal, Ram Prasad Bismil and others to fight for a federal republic of India, needed money for arms. On 9 August 1925 Rajendra Lahiri pulled the alarm chain on the No. 8 Down passenger train to Lucknow near Kakori, and about ten men broke open the guard's safe of railway takings. A passenger was killed by a stray shot.
Arrests followed that autumn. After a long trial at Lucknow, Bismil was hanged at Gorakhpur, Ashfaqulla Khan at Faizabad and Roshan Singh at Allahabad on 19 December 1927, and Lahiri at Gonda two days earlier. Others were transported for life. Chandrashekhar Azad escaped the police and rebuilt the group with Bhagat Singh as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in 1928.
Bismil, a Hindu poet of the Arya Samaj, and Ashfaqulla, a Muslim, were close friends, and the pair became a lasting emblem of Hindu–Muslim comradeship. In 2021 the Uttar Pradesh government renamed the event, long called the Kakori kand, the Kakori Train Action.
- political
- colonial