The Ghadar movement or Ghadar Party was an early 20th-century international political movement founded by expatriate Indians with the aim of overthrowing British rule in India. Many of the Ghadar Party founders and leaders, including Sohan Singh Bhakna, went on and join the Babbar Akali Movement and helped it in logistics as a party and publishing its own newspaper in the post-World War I era. The early movement was created by the revolutionaries who lived and worked on the West Coast of the United States and Canada, and the movement later spread to India and Indian diasporic communities around the world. The official founding has been dated to a meeting on 15 July 1913 in Astoria, Oregon, and the group splintered into two factions the first time in 1914, with the Sikh-majority faction known as the “Azad Punjab Ghadar” and the Hindu-majority faction known as the “Hindustan Ghadar.” The Azad Punjab Ghadar Party's headquarters and anti-colonial newspaper publications headquarters remained in the Stockton Gurdwara in Stockton, California, and the Hindustan Ghadar Party's headquarters and Hindustan Ghadar newspaper relocated to nearby Oakland, California.
During World War I in 1914, the Ghadar Movement, a group of Indian revolutionaries, allied with Germany, finding common ground in their opposition to British imperial rule in India. Germany strategically considered these revolutionaries vital allies against the British Empire. Their collaborative goal was to destabilize British control through a multifaceted strategy, encompassing a synchronized effort to invade British India via Afghanistan, provide resources to bolster the Indian independence movement, and disseminate propaganda to incite mutiny within the British Indian Army.When Ghadarites supported German ambition of invading India. Kashmir was key to their plan, The Print, 30 April 2025. Consequently, some Ghadar party members returned to Punjab to instigate an armed revolution for Indian Independence. The Ghadar Mutiny, as this uprising became known, involved Ghadarites smuggling arms into India and encouraging Indian troops to revolt against the British. This attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, leading to the execution of 42 mutineers after the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial. Undeterred, Ghadarites continued underground anti-colonial actions from 1914 to 1917 with support from Germany and Ottoman Turkey, a period known as the Hindu–German Conspiracy, which culminated in a sensational trial in San Francisco in 1917.
Following the war's conclusion, the party in the United States fractured into a communist and an anti-communist faction. The party was formally dissolved in 1948. Key participants in the Ghadar Movement included K. B. Menon, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Mewa Singh Lopoke, Bhai Parmanand, Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, Har Dayal, Tarak Nath Das, Bhagat Singh Thind, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Udham Singh, Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barakatullah, Rashbehari Bose, Ishar Singh Gill and Gulab Kaur. The insurrectionary ideals of the Ghadar Party influenced the members of the Indian Independence Movement opposed to Gandhian nonviolence. To carry out other revolutionary activities, "Swadesh Sevak Home" at Vancouver and United India House at Seattle was set up.
In 1918, the party split into the Kirti Kisan Sabha, which had communist and socialist leanings and later aligned with Congress, and the Babbar Akali faction, which was Sikhism-centric.
Etymology The movement derived its name from the Punjabi word ghadr or ghadar often translated as "mutiny" or "revolution".
History
Background Due to farming becoming more economically unviable in the Punjab, many residents emigrated overseas for other opportunities, first to East Asia. While in East Asia, they learnt about prospects in North America, leading to them moving to the United States and Canada. Many of these early migrants were Sikhs, who had no traditional taboo for travel overseas.
Between 1903 and 1913 approximately 10,000 South Asians emigres entered North America, mostly from the rural regions of central Punjab. 99% of the 5,000 Indians who moved to Canada by 1908 were Punjabis, with 80% of them being Sikhs, often ex-servicemen and originating from the districts of Jullundur, Hoshiarpur, Ludhiana and Amritsar of Punjab. Many of them were illiterate farmers and laborers, students, and priests. Not only Canada, they also settled in the US. Places first settled by them in both countries include San Francisco, Stockton, Portland, Saint John, Vancouver, and Victoria. Early arrivees such Amar Singh, Gopal Singh, Tarak Nath Das, and Ram Nath Puri started promoting anti-colonial views when they got to North America, with the founding of an Urdu periodical, the Azādī kā Circular, which attempted to persuade Indians in the colonial military to oppose the British.
About half the Punjabis had served in the British military. The Canadian government decided to curtail this influx with a series of laws, which were aimed at limiting the entry of South Asians into the country and restricting the political rights of those already in the country. Many migrants came to work in the fields, factories, and logging camps of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, where they were exposed to labor unions and the ideas of the radical Industrial Workers of the World or IWW. The migrants of the Pacific Northwest banded together in Sikh gurdwaras and formed political Hindustani Associations for mutual aid.
In the United States, organisations such as the Indo-American Society and Indo-American National Association were founded to assist South Asian migrants living in New York and Chicago. These groups invited Indian students to study in the United States, especially at UC Berkeley in San Francisco, California, by providing them economic support, such as through the India House, which provided free habitation (with similar India Houses appearing in London and Paris). These student-outreach efforts were led by Har Dayal of Stanford University, Sant Teja Singh of Harvard University, and Bhai Parmanand. Some of those who arrived were rebels rather than students. Har Dayal had come to the United States in 1911 to study at Oxford University but forfeited his scholarship to protest British-rule in India, with him returning to India and getting into legal trouble there. After returning to America, Dayal secured a job teaching Indian philosophy at Stanford University but got into trouble with the university after expressing anarchist views and overplaying his connection to Stanford. Har Dayal indulged in Buddhism and Marxism, making connections with German communists and Punjabi agriculturalists. Dayal met Ram Chandra on the campus of Berkeley University, with both figures playing a major role in the early Ghadar Party.
Nationalist sentiments were also building around the world among South Asian emigres and students, where they could organize more freely than in British India. Several dozen students came to study at the University of Berkeley, some spurred by a scholarship offered by a wealthy Punjabi farmer, Jawala Singh. Revolutionary intellectuals like Har Dayal and Taraknath Das attempted to organize students and educate them in anarchist and nationalist ideas.
Diverse groups of Indian migrants became united due to similar racial struggles and a shared feeling that they had left India due to colonialism. According to Emily C. Brown, Indian nationalism arose amongst these early immigrants due to racial tensions and race-riots existing in North American society between Whites and Asians, with Chinese and Japanese victims being supported by the governments of China and Japan while there was no Indian government advocating for the rights of Indians abroad. The Indians were also mocked for being "slaves". Targeting Indian immigration in-particular, the Canadian government introduced the continuous journey regulation, a mandatory $200 amount per immigrant, and tried persuading Indians to move to British Honduras instead. The wives and children of the immigrant men were not allowed to join them abroad due to discriminatory immigration policies. Thus, the Indian nationalists, some of whom had become citizens in their new country of residence, believed that they were unfairly subject to such treatment due to lacking any nation of their own. They attempted to secure their rights through organisations, such as the Khalsa Diwan Society in Vancouver in 1907 with branches all over British Columbia that rejected the British Honduran plan of the Canadian government. In 1909, the Hindustan Association was founded by Bhag Singh Bhikhiwind that advocated for native government, education, industrialization, and the safe-guarding from foreign-theft in India. It also had two periodicals associated with it, one in Punjabi known as the Pardesī Khālsā and another in Urdu known as the Svadesh Sevak. It also operated a Svadesh Sevak Home. The United India League succeeded the Hindustan Association on 15 December 1911. Persons such as Sohan Singh Bhakna, Harnam Singh Tundilat, Udham Singh Kasel, Ram Rakha, and Ishar Singh Marhana like were involved in its activities and based out of St. John and Seattle. They were able to successfully defend against race-riots attacks by White workers in 1911 due to being united and armed. The Hindustani (or Hindi) Association of the West Coast was founded in Portland in 1912 with Sohan Singh Bhakna as president and G. D. Kumar as General-Secretary (Kumar was later replaced by Lala Har Dayal due to illness). The organisation ran a weekly Urdu periodical known as the Hindustān.
Ras Bihari Bose on request from Vishnu Ganesh Pingle, an American trained Ghadar, who met Bose at Benares and requested him to take up the leadership of the coming revolution. But before accepting the responsibility, he sent Sachin Sanyal to the Punjab to assess the situation. Sachin returned very optimistic, in the United States and Canada with the aim to liberate India from British rule. The movement began with a group of immigrants known as the Hindustani Workers of the Pacific Coast.
Founding
Har Dayal and other nationalists on the Pacific West Coast of North America, such as in California, Oregon, and Washington State, became increasingly united between 1912 and 1913. The Ghadar Party, initially the Pacific Coast Hindustan Association, was formed on 15 July 1913 in the United States. In a May 1913 meeting of the association, they decided to found a Ghadr Āshram (also known as the Yugāntar Āshram) as the base for the Ghadar Party in San Francisco, with its operations extending to both the United States and Canada. The founding conference of the Ghadar movement was held at the Finnish Socialist Hall of Astoria, Oregon in 1913. The founding structure of the party was as follows: +Founding members of the Ghadar Party, 1913No.NamePosition1.Sohan Singh BhaknaPresident2.Kesar Singh ThathgarhVice-president3.Lala Har DayalGeneral Secretary and editor of the Ghadar (Urdu edition)4.Kartar Singh SarabhaEditor of the Ghadar (Punjabi edition)5.Jawala SinghVice-president6.Waisakha Singh7.Balwant Singh8.Pt. Kanshi RamTreasurer9.Harnam Singh Tundilat10.G. D. Verma11.Lala Thaker Das DhuriVice-Secretary12.Munshi Ram13.Bhai Parmanand14.Nidhan Singh Chugha15.Santokh Singh16.Udham Singh17.Harnam Singh Kari Sari18.Karim Bakhsh19.Amar Chand20.Vishnu Ganesh Pingle
The founding aim of the Ghadar Party was the eradication of British-rule from India through an armed insurgency,Johanna Ogden. “Ghadar, Historical Silences, and Notions of Belonging: Early 1900s Punjabis of the Columbia River.” Oregon Historical Quarterly, vol. 113, no. 2, 2012, pp. 164–97. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5403/oregonhistq.113.2.0164. Accessed 12 May 2026. expressed by them as follows: