Chittagong Armoury Raid 1930 — The Complete Sequence of Events

Act one · the conditions

Before

By the opening months of 1930 the constitutional argument in India had run out of room. The Simon Commission of 1927 had contained no Indian member; the Congress session at Lahore in December 1929 had adopted purna swaraj, complete independence, as its demand; and on 6 April 1930 Gandhi reached the sea at Dandi and broke the salt law, opening a national civil disobedience campaign.

Chittagong offered a revolutionary organisation something that most of Bengal did not. It was the eastern seaboard’s working port and the terminus of the Assam-Bengal Railway, so it held arms, communications and rolling stock. It was also far enough from Calcutta that reinforcement would take time — and time was the only resource a group of sixty-five could realistically hope to win.

Surya Sen’s network had by then been rebuilt for roughly two years since his release from prison at the end of 1928, and had a name that stated its intention rather than concealing it: the Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch.

Act two · the plan

Preparation

The operation treated Chittagong as a system rather than as a target. Four objectives, struck simultaneously, were meant to leave the district armed, silent and immobile at the same moment.

Scroll sideways to see the whole diagram.

Schematic · not a map A diagram of the night’s four objectives and who led each. Distances and directions shown here are arbitrary; no attempt has been made to represent the geography of Chittagong, because the street-level detail needed to do so accurately is not available to this archive.

The date carried a tactical judgement. 18 April 1930 fell on Good Friday, and the planners expected British officials and residents to be away from their posts and gathered socially — which is why the European Club at Pahartali was on the list at all.

One assumption in the plan was never tested before the night, and it proved decisive: that the armouries would hold usable ammunition alongside their rifles. They did not, or the raiders could not find it in the time available.

Act three · the night

18 April 1930

22:00

Objective 01

The police armoury

Group led by Ganesh Ghosh

The district’s principal police arsenal, and the primary objective of the night. It was captured.

Outcome Taken. It became the site of the proclamation: Surya Sen took a military salute, the national flag was hoisted, and a Provisional Revolutionary Government was declared.

Objective 02

The Auxiliary Force armoury

Group of about ten led by Lokenath Bal

The armoury of the Auxiliary Force, the part-time European volunteer force maintained in Indian districts.

Outcome Taken. Rifles were seized here and at the police armoury, but the raiders failed to locate ammunition — the single failure that decided everything after it.

Objective 03

Communications and railway

Group led by Ambika Chakrabarty

Telephone and telegraph lines, and the movement of trains on the Assam-Bengal Railway.

Outcome Achieved. Wires were cut and train movement was disrupted, isolating Chittagong from the rest of the province for a period.

Objective 04

The European Club, Pahartali

Party of about sixteen

A social club for the town’s European residents, expected to be occupied on a Good Friday evening.

Outcome Not achieved. The club was found nearly empty. It would be attacked again on 24 September 1932, in an operation led by Pritilata Waddedar.

The proclamation

At the captured police armoury, Surya Sen took a military salute, hoisted the national flag and proclaimed a Provisional Revolutionary Government. For a group of sixty-five people holding rifles they could not load, this was not theatre for its own sake. It was a legal and political claim: that what had happened was an act of government, not an act of crime — the distinction on which the whole revolutionary case rested, and the one the tribunals of 1932 and 1933 would explicitly reject.

Why they left

Without ammunition, holding the town against the troops certain to arrive was impossible. Before dawn the raiders withdrew from Chittagong and moved into the hills outside it, taking what arms they had.

Act four · 22 April 1930

Jalalabad hill

Four days after the raid, on 22 April 1930, British forces located the revolutionaries at Jalalabad hill outside Chittagong and engaged them. A sustained gunfight followed.

Twelve revolutionaries were killed. Among them was Harigopal Bal, known as Tegra, the younger brother of Lokenath Bal, who was commanding on the hill. Figures given for casualties on the British side differ markedly between accounts; a figure of more than eighty is frequently repeated in nationalist retellings, but it is not consistently supported, and this archive does not present it as established.

The survivors dispersed after the engagement. From that point the Chittagong movement ceased to be a body capable of taking objectives and became something harder for the administration to deal with: small groups, moving in the countryside, sheltered by villagers, still armed.

Act five · 1930–1934

Aftermath

Escape, pursuit, surrender

Ganesh Ghosh, Ananta Singh and Jiban Ghoshal made their way towards Calcutta and took shelter in Chandernagore, then French territory and outside British police jurisdiction. A raid there, associated with the Calcutta police commissioner Charles Tegart, killed Jiban Ghoshal; Ganesh Ghosh was arrested. Ananta Singh, on learning of the treatment of imprisoned comrades, surrendered to the police in Calcutta on 28 June 1930. Lokenath Bal was arrested on 1 September 1930 after a gunfight, and sentenced to transportation for life on 1 March 1932.

The resistance did not stop

On 1 December 1930 Ramkrishna Biswas and Kalipada Chakrabarty attempted to kill a senior British police official named Craig and shot a railway inspector, Tarini Mukherjee, instead; Biswas was hanged at Alipore Jail on 4 August 1931. On 13 June 1932, at Dhalghat, Captain Cameron was killed in an encounter in which Nirmal Sen and Apurba Sen died covering Surya Sen’s escape. On 24 September 1932 Pritilata Waddedar led the second attack on the Pahartali European Club and took cyanide rather than be captured.

The trials

The principal Chittagong armoury raid case was tried as a mass proceeding. Of the defendants, twelve were sentenced to transportation for life, two received three-year prison terms, and thirty-two were acquitted. Those transported were sent to the Cellular Jail at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands, the colonial penal settlement reserved for political prisoners.

Ambika Chakrabarty, arrested months after Jalalabad, was sentenced to death; on appeal the sentence was reduced to transportation for life. Ananta Singh, sent to Port Blair, took part in a prolonged hunger strike in 1932 and was afterwards moved to a mainland jail. Most of the Chittagong prisoners in the Andamans were not released until 1946.

Surya Sen himself was still at large through all of this. His own trial, before commissioners appointed under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1925, did not come until 1933.

Act six · the assessment

Significance

Judged as a military operation, the raid failed within hours. The armouries yielded arms without ammunition; the town could not be held; the withdrawal ended in a defeat at Jalalabad four days later; and the organisation was destroyed over the following four years, with its leader executed and most of its members dead or transported.

Judged as a political act, its effect was of a different order. A group of civilians in a single district had taken physical control of the armed apparatus of British administration, declared a government in its place, and forced the state to retake the district by military means. It happened twelve days after the salt march reached the sea, in the most closely reported year of the independence struggle to that point.

Historians continue to disagree about how much the revolutionary tradition contributed to the end of colonial rule relative to mass civil disobedience and to post-war political and economic pressure. What is not in dispute is that Chittagong became a fixed reference point — invoked, argued over, filmed, taught — for the proposition that colonial authority was not physically invulnerable.