Chandrashekhar Azad

Early life

Chandrashekhar Azad grew up partly in Bhabhra, a village in a tribal Bhil-majority tract of what was then Alwar/central India, where as a boy he learned archery and horsemanship alongside Bhil children, skills later credited with contributing to his marksmanship and physical endurance as an underground revolutionary. He joined the Non-Cooperation Movement as a teenager and was arrested for participation in 1921; when brought before a magistrate he reportedly gave his name as "Azad" (free), his father's name as "Swatantra" (independence) and his address as "jail," and was sentenced to a public whipping. The episode is generally credited with hardening his commitment to revolutionary rather than constitutional methods, and he adopted "Azad" as his name from that point. He later took a vow never to be taken alive by the police.

Revolutionary career

Azad joined the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA), a revolutionary organisation committed to armed struggle against British rule, and took part in its most prominent early operation, the Kakori train robbery of August 1925, in which HRA members held up a train near Kakori, in the United Provinces, to seize government funds for the organisation's activities; Azad was among the few implicated members who evaded capture after the colonial government's crackdown, which led to the execution of several HRA leaders, including Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqulla Khan. Azad worked to rebuild the shattered organisation and, in 1928, reconstituted it as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) together with Bhagat Singh, giving the group an explicitly socialist programme alongside its earlier commitment to armed revolution. Later in 1928, in retaliation for the death of Lala Lajpat Rai from injuries sustained during a police lathi charge on a protest against the Simon Commission, Azad, Bhagat Singh and Rajguru planned and carried out the killing of British police officer J. P. Saunders in Lahore, whom they mistook for the officer responsible for ordering the charge against Lajpat Rai. In December 1929, Azad was also involved in planning an attempt to derail and bomb the train carrying Viceroy Lord Irwin near Delhi; the explosion damaged part of the train but Irwin was unhurt, and the HSRA claimed responsibility in a statement that framed the act as retaliation for the treatment of Bhagat Singh and other imprisoned revolutionaries. Azad was known within the underground movement for his skill with firearms, and is credited with training other HSRA members, including Bhagat Singh, in shooting practice at secluded sites such as the ravines near Jhansi and the forests around Orchha, where he sometimes lived disguised as a wandering ascetic to avoid detection.

Death

Azad continued to organise and evade arrest through 1929 and 1930 as colonial authorities pursued HSRA members following the Saunders killing and the Assembly bombing carried out by Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt. He remained at large while Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev stood trial in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, working in the interim to rebuild the organisation's networks in the United Provinces, but did not live to see their execution, which followed his own death by roughly three weeks. On 27 February 1931, he was meeting an associate at Alfred Park in Allahabad when the location was betrayed to the police, who surrounded the park. In the ensuing exchange of fire, Azad held off his pursuers before turning his final bullet on himself, keeping his earlier vow never to be taken alive.

Memory

Azad never stood trial and was never photographed in police custody, unlike most of his HSRA associates, a fact often noted in accounts of the underground movement given how effectively he evaded capture over nearly a decade of revolutionary activity. Alfred Park, the site of his death, was renamed Chandrashekhar Azad Park after independence, and he is commonly grouped with Bhagat Singh and Rajguru in popular memory of the HSRA's armed campaign against colonial rule, alongside the parallel, mass-mobilisation strand of the independence movement led by Gandhi and the Congress.