Revolutionaries on Trial
Reviewed by Harish Jain
Aparna Vaidik, a professor of history at Ashoka University, is among the few scholars genuinely and keenly interested in the stories of revolutionaries who, through their extraordinary deeds, captured the imagination of a disheartened nation but were subsequently marginalised. Over more than a decade of fieldwork, she has amassed a vast collection of material on the lives and actions of these revolutionaries. Organising and presenting such an extensive amount of information into a coherent narrative is no small feat, as she acknowledges.
Vaidik is perhaps the only Indian historian who has accessed the records of the Lahore Conspiracy Case at the Punjab Government State Archives in Lahore, visiting the city twice in her pursuit. She also spent considerable time in London researching the India Office Records at the British Library, drawing extensively from these to support her arguments. In her work, she foregrounds several key sedition trials, including the Assembly Bomb Case, the Lahore Conspiracy Case (both the magisterial and tribunal trials), and the Delhi Bomb Case trial.
She challenges the notion that these trials merely represent Britain’s failure to uphold the rule of law. Instead, she contends that they reveal a hidden history of colonial violence, typically unacknowledged, except in notable instances like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. This event exposed the British colonial violence that lay beneath the ideology of the ‘rule of law’. She further argues that the “gap between the reason of state (power) and the rule of law (moral ideology)” is insufficient to fully understand the history of these trials.
According to Vaidik, sedition can be better understood by examining the “illicit relationship between law and violence”. She argues that the colonial state’s courts and tribunals relied on a form of violence deeply embedded in the legal system through the law-making process. In her quest for truth, Vaidik navigates a complex landscape of witnesses, approvers, betrayers, renegades, judicial records, colonial archives and contemporary news sources like The Tribune and Hindustan Times. Leveraging her extensive scholarship, she posits that conspiracy and sedition trials were ultimately pantomime shows designed to camouflage their true intent — the survival and perpetual rule of the colonial state. However, the revolutionaries were no political novices. They harnessed their energy and seized every opportunity to amplify their voices, resonating throughout the vast country. Bhagat Singh and his comrades soon became the heartbeat of the nation.
Vaidik further questions why the colonial state chose to put revolutionaries on trial despite having a repertoire of violence at its disposal, and how this choice aids our understanding of the colonial state’s conduct. She finds her answer in the sanitised due process of law, executed by the judiciary and prosecution lawyers, which nullifies the use of cannons and bayonets and renders the violence invisible. In her earnest attempt to view all events fairly, she narrows the gap between the betrayer and the betrayed, using the role of Hans Raj Vohra as a cue.
It is rare to encounter a work of such depth in this genre, based on primary sources and enriching the reader with a wealth of fresh and ungettable material. The book emphatically traces Bhagat Singh’s journey from one among equals to a leader and icon. There is not enough space to describe, much less discuss, this multi-dimensional book in the detail it highly deserves….
***************************************************
Democracy and workers’ movements – stories from Jamshedpur
1938: the year Indian workers fought for themselves
Unworkable: Swapping Palestinian workers with Indians
Redefining the American Working Class. Shamira Ibrahim
Frequent gas accidents threatens safety of Chinese workers
Narayani Gupta: The problem with cherry-picking facts from history
After the truth-shower 