The Alipore Bomb Trial

Srijut Bijoy Krishna Bose

Foreword

A publication intended to reproduce authentic reports of some of the more outstanding criminal trials attests its own merits and needs no foreword from me or any one else. As I chanced to lead for the Crown is the trial related in this volume in all three Courts - the Magistrate's, the Sessions Judge's and the High Court- I presume my intimate connection with the case has prompted the appeal to me for something in the nature of an introduction.

The political history of a people in unfortunately often mirrored in the Courts of Justice. The reflection is, however, only partially faithful. Much that has led to criminal action is not disclosed, impulses are misunderstood or misinterpreted, and motives imputed through heat and passion which bear no connection with the true facts. The scope of a trial is necessarily limited and confined by the exigencies of procedure. The French starting with the assumption that an accused person is guilty, rove by way of cross-examination over the whole of a man's life- they throw the burden of innocence upon the arraigned. The British principle, however, is that every accused person is innocent until he is proved guilty; we throw the burden of guilty upon the prosecution. The two procedures are antithetical - their methods are different - their aims antagonistic. To the English lawyer the foreign procedure is repellant - to foreigners British criminal ethics appear inefficient. It is the latter system which prevails in India, and it was under that system, with all its merits and its faults, that Barendra Kumar Ghose and his associates were tried.

i

The ringleader was a young man of unusual qualities. No lawyer can defend his action; no statesman applaud it. None the less Barendra Kumar Ghose was sincere and in a great measure chivalrous. Obsessed by conceptions of the injustice of the policy which severed his Motherland, he believed that the only influence which could force recognition of views which appeared to him to be patriotic was recourse to violence. Himself imbued with the passionate fervour of the genuine militant reformer, Barendra infected a large following of youthful adherents with his own unhappy enthusiasm. The gospel of the revolver and the bomb spread with alarming, if secret, success; a huge organisation developed throughout the country: inflammatory articles were openly disseminated by an able if disaffected press and the peace of the country was assuredly in peril. The Government had for long permitted revolutionary literature to pass unnoticed: the permitted revolutionary literature to pass unnoticed: the ferment grew under a misplaced sense of security till overt measures forced the authorities into action. Their intervention was swift and certain. Simultaneous raids on the brothers Arabindo and Barendra Kumar Ghose, and on the 18^th May 1908 the case was put up before the committing Magistrate, Mr. Birley I.C.S. At Alipure. The accused reserved their cross-examination. After fifty-five witnesses had been examined the Magistrate, at the request of prosecuting counsel, committed the accused to Sessions, an undertaking being given that proofs of all additional witnesses to be called by the government would be furnished to the defence before such witnesses were called. The undertaking was fulfilled and a great waste of time there by obviated. In the committing Magistrate's Court Counsel for the Crown received his first letter threatening to blow him out of existence.

ii

When the Court rose I went up to the Dock and asked Barendra if he approved this promise for my extermination. He courteously informed me that wad no personal objection to myself but that I was an obstruction to justice from the point of view of the accused and that much as he could regret my disappearance he could not forbid it. Then thrusting aside my insignificance, - for after all, as he reminded me, I was but small fry, a mere parasite – he ventured to predict that those behind the scenes would at higher game, a Commander-in-Chief and a Viceroy. I pointedly objected that Britons would no more consent to being intimidated than they would to being slaves, and that there was an indefinite number of noblemen to whom the position of a Viceroy and his emoluments would more than overcome the dread of assassination, Barendra assured me that the supply would in time prove insufficient to meet the demand. He spoke without heat, not as one directing murder but has a philosophic politician in mental touch and sympathy with the view of his countrymen. Long after, his sagacity was exemplified by the attack at Delhi on Lord Hardinge. The epistolary threats against me multiplied – they provided an infinite variety of death – unpleasant references were made to bombs, revolvers, and knives. My junior was so alarmed that he declined to drive to Court with me in my car and reached his end by circuitous approaches which daily changed their course. He has since died and I survive. In the Sessions Court my unknown enemies varied the sameness of their terror by sending me letters without stamps. I declined to pay for notices of my impending dissolution but my friend Shamsul Alum my right-hand police officer (who was subsequently shot in the corridors of the High Court when the Advocate General, Kenrick K.C., during my absence in England, was arguing the case on reference to Mr. Justice Harrington as to five accused upon whose fate Sir Lawrence Jenkins and Mr. Justice Carnduff had disagreed) indignantly paid the postage himself and thereby accumulated a mass of instructive literature by diagrams.

iii

In the Sessions Court the accused were placed behind a network of wire, police with fixed bayonets stood on guard throughout the room, and I had a five-chambered loaded revolver lying on my brief throughout the trial. The government, regarding me, I presume, as a valuable investment in consequence of the fees they had paid me, insisted I should personally be guarded. Thereafter I was surrounded at my house and on my drives to Court by stalwart C.I.D. Officers who struck one as being more dangerous with their loaded revolvers to myself than my prospective assailants.

However misguided Barendra was, he was obviously honest and chivalrous. His holograph confession sought to take the whole blame to himself and to exonerate his colleagues. He declined to apply, though a European British subject by the accident of his birth, for a trial by jury before the High Court, and though he declined to make any admissions, he instructed his Counsel R. C. Bonerjee not to deny the writing or signature to the famous “Sweets” letter on which his brother Arabindo was acquitted – by mistake.

The evidence was undoubtedly true and convincing. The police had done their share of detection with skill, with daring and with honesty. The increminatory character of the documents was irrefutable, of the weapons and other things found, incontestable. Barendra Kumar Ghosh was, I still think rightly , convicted by Mr. Beachcroft, the Sessions Judge, of waging war against the King, and was awarded the death sentence. The Appellate Court reversed that finding, and holding that war had not been waged commuted the death sentence to imprisonment for life. Under the late amnesty after the war Barendra and his colleagues have been released.

iv

There were some remarkable incidents after and immediately before the arrest. Mrs. and Miss Kennedy were murdered by a bomb intended for Mr. Kingsford, I.C.S. At Mozufferpore. For these deaths Kuderam was hanged and his fellow helper committed suicide. The approver Narendranath Gossain was murdered in jail before he had completed his examination-in-chief in the Magistrate's Court by two of the accused under trial, both of whom were hanged. The prosecution consequently lost his evidence at sessions. Bannerjee, a police officer, was shot before he could be called as a witness, and his murderer was never discovered. The most dramatic was the murder of Babu Ashutosh Biswas the public prosecutor, my colleague, who one afternoon was conducting the prosecution during my absence from Court. He was shot in the back in the immediate vicinity of the Session Court by a young man who forfeited his life in return at the gallows.

As I landed at Bombay in February 1912 from England I was told by the police of the murder in the corridor of the High Court at Calcutta of Shamshul Alum by a man who ran away , was caught , and subsequently hanged for the crime.

Arabindo Ghose had been a brilliant scholar in England. He had been Head of St. Paul's and won a scholarship at King's College Cambridge. There he was a contemporary of Mr. Beachcroft I.C.S., who tried him at Alipore and who had been Head of Rugby and had also won a scholarship at Cambridge. Both won honours at the University, and at the final examination for the Indian Civil Service Arabindo, the prisoner beat Beachcroft the Judge in – Greek!

v

No plea or apology or extenuation for the offence for which Barendra and his friends were convicted can be offered, but I could not but regret the melancholy untowardness which accounted for the appearance in the dock of youths who, though offenders, had, in the main, offended from a spirit of mistaken patriotism. To me it appeared a matter for regret that a man of Arabindo's mental calibre should have been ejected from the Civil Service on the ground he could not, or would not, ride a horse. Capacity such as his would have been found for him in the Educational Service of India I believe he would have gone far not merely in personal advancement but in welding more firmly the links which bind his countrymen to ours. The new era of reform, in spite of local, and I believe temporary, cleavage, illumines India's political sky and promises a future as much a matter of just pride to the Englishman as of hope and contentment and advance to the Indian. Under such auspices a better and more trustful Liberalism let us hope, will infuse healthier political circulation into the country's system, and hereafter make impossible a return to the methods employed by those with whom these pages deal.

vi