TURKEY, INDIA, AND THE RUSSIAN EXAMPLE
The Russian legacy in the history of terrorism is undeniable. Across the world, from Europe to North America, terrorists studied the Russian methods in depth. Anarchists in the United States honed their craft based on what they read, and the Irish used it to advance their cause of separation from the United Kingdom. Unfortunately for Russia, Polish socialists learned these methods as well and were soon engaged in assassinations and robberies of banks and trains. Neither was the Balkan region immune to the contagion of terrorism. For many decades, terrorism was studied and practiced there, and even came to influence the Russians. Sergey Stepnyak-Kravchinsky had gone to fight in Herzegovina in the 1870s, and Ivan Kalyayev once told a comrade that while there were only a few Russian terrorists as yet, he hoped he would live to see the existence of a really popular terrorist movement as existed in Macedonia. Their ideology, though, was not that of the Russians. Probably a few knew of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, but they were nationalists. They most likely found inspiration from the likes of Giuseppe Mazzini rather than anything produced by the Narodnaya Volya. Of course, they observed some of the practices. They were ascetic, much like the Narodniki, and valued chastity, much like the Russians. They also believed virtue was necessary for political assassination, and only those who had the necessary nobility of the mind could engage in the practice.
The Russian example also mattered in Asia. The Armenians sought to emulate them in their bid for independence, especially in the form of Avetis Nazarbeck. He seems to have been influenced by the Narodnaya Volya after converting to socialism, largely due to the influence of his Russian fiancée, who had participated in Russian revolutionary movements. The program of the Dashnak Party (1892) stated that the revolutionary bands intended “to terrorize government officials, informers, traitors, usurers and every kind of exploiter.” Nazarbeck and his cohorts cultivated relationships with Armenians living in Russia as well, with these acquiring weapons made in the Tula factory or clandestinely purchased in the Russian armory in Tiflis.
The Armenian revolutionary movements had an impossible task. As a minority, they were disliked by the autocratic Ottoman Empire and by the local population as well. They were intellectual and engaged in dialectic practices of fomenting strategy. Some thought it was foolish to engage the Ottomans while they were not engaged in some war involving the Arabs or a major European power, and others thought it best to engage immediately. Eventually, the latter group won, but given their numerical inferiority, they sought to provoke the Ottomans. Their aim was that of all terrorist groups from their era: to force an overreaction. The assumption was that any attack by the Armenians against the Turks would provoke a large enough reprisal to mobilize the Armenian public to rise up against the Ottoman Empire. They also believed that a major massacre committed by the Turks would lead to intervention of some great European power, which would help them achieve freedom. This approach had worked for the Bulgarians, and they believed it could work for them as well. If not that, they hoped to inspire other minority groups in the empire to rise up. Their attempts proved futile. They staged some important attacks, including the seizure of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople in 1896, but all it did was provoke the massacre of thousands of Armenians. There was no help from the major European powers.
What happened in Armenia was emblematic of many nationalist movements employing terrorism. The larger population distrusted nationalists. This was the case even with the Russians. When Dmitry Karakozov was apprehended after shooting the tsar in 1866, he called his captors fools for remaining loyal to the Russian government. This was the same for the Turks. To them, the Armenian nationalists were fifth columnists committing treason, as such requiring little reason to react so viciously against the general Armenian population. For them, the attack was not only an affront to the Ottoman Empire; it was an attack against Islam and the Turkish people themselves.
TERRORISM BY INDIAN NATIONALISTS AND FORMER PACIFISTS
Nonetheless, Russian ideas continued to spread like the plague. Indian revolutionaries found a method for their goals of achieving independence from Britain. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, writing in 1906, noted that “protests are of no avail and the days of prayer have gone … look to the examples of Ireland, Japan, and Russia and follow their methods.” Some Russians also saw an opportunity to interact directly. In 1908, Senapati Bapat sent a bomb-making manual to India, which was given to him by a Russian chemical engineer and was translated by another sympathetic Russian for Bapat’s Free India Society based in London. Of course, much like the Armenians discussed earlier, not everything the Russians did worked for them as well. They did not share the same love for socialism and much preferred what Mazzini had to say about patriotism to treatises by the Narodnaya Volya. So important was Mazzini to the vanguard of the Indian revolutionary terrorists that one of their most important leaders, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, wrote a biography of the Italian, which was later banned under the Indian Press Act of 1910.
The efficacy of these ideas was limited in the Indian context. Rarely did they kill the intended person; instead, they killed civilians. The significance of Indian terrorism is not necessarily its tactical innovations but rather the syncretism between Western terrorist doctrine and its own homegrown ideas. First, there was a revivalism and retroactive worship of assassinations from prior eras. In 1897, Tilak noted how a Hindu by the name of Shivaji had killed a Muslim general named Afzal Khan, leading to celebrations and adulations toward Shivaji. The murder notably occurred during a peace parley. Gandhi later condemned Shivaji as misguided. Using Shivaji and others as examples, editorials in Marathi offered justifications for murder if they occurred for some noble cause. Most of Marathi’s readership were orthodox Hindus who disparaged reformist politicians for their assimilationist tendencies toward the West, going against their religious views. In their manifestos, they announced, “We shall assuredly shed upon the earth the lifeblood of the enemies who destroy religion.” A decade later, Jugantar, the most popular daily in its time, reaffirmed this message: theft, criminality, and murder were okay if they served a higher good—that of religion. Killing foreigners was regarded as jagna, or a religious ceremony. Jugantar and other dailies advised where to manufacture bombs and the most reliable sources for importing weapons in secrecy. Tilak, in an echo of the Thuggee cult, would often praise Kali, the goddess of death, in his speeches: “We are all Hindus and idolaters and I am not ashamed of it.” He also imputed magical properties to bombs and guns. Savarkar and his followers learned from this and shed their previous pacifism as a result. He remarked that this former stance stymied the “faculty of resisting sin” and enervated the cause of independence. Following his predecessors, he wrote a book on the Indian War of Independence of 1857, and in it, he praised Brutus’s sword and Wilhelm Tell’s arrows as divine. He juxtaposed these alongside key events from Indian history, citing acts of vengeance against evildoers as examples of excellence. These tracts blatantly advocating assassination and rebellion were subsequently banned in the United Kingdom, and the publisher of these dailies moved to India.
London suffered terrorist acts at the hands of these Indian nationals. In 1909, a student of Krishna Varma—a sociologist who advocated assassination—killed Sir William Curzon Wyllie, Lord Morley’s political secretary. Other lesser plots occurred, but the next upswing came in the 1920s. Savarkar’s preaching had amplified from targeting Britons to attacking Muslims and perceived other Indians to be enemies as well. Savarkar would eventually become the leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and assert control over its military wing, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Mahasabha took a hard-line stance that India could not be divided and that anyone opposed to this was a traitor. RSS’s membership came mainly from Savarkar’s hometown of Poona. One of the Brahmins of RSS, Savarkar’s assistant, would later kill Gandhi in 1948. The Indian judiciary never managed to link Savarkar to the death, and he remained free. He died at eighty-two in 1966.
The next important Indian terrorist group emerged, ironically, from Gandhi’s following. These individuals had adhered to Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, but reneged after they came to believe that his goals were unobtainable. In 1928, they formed the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA). These individuals took inspiration from socialists and communists. Bhagat Singh, for example, had studied Marx and supported the USSR. They explained their ideology in the “Philosophy of the Bomb,” noting that they neither wanted mercy nor planned to offer it: “Ours is a war to the end—to Victory or Death.” Curiously, they did not want to be labeled a violent nationalist revolution that used bombs and pistols. They saw themselves as the revolutionary vanguard for the proletariat. They qualified their stance, however, by noting that most of the peasants and the poor remained too uneducated to understand why their cause mattered. The more widely held view was that the only viable vanguard was the nationalist terrorists the HSRA had criticized earlier. This culminated in a bloody idea: that India’s youth needed to be mobilized if anything was going to change. These young men and women would give purchase not only to propaganda of the deed but also to the propaganda of death. This confusing mess of ideas had precedence and, to some extent, logical coherence given the underdevelopment of most of India at the time. Much like Mao’s revolutionaries, who thought they could skip the advance of capitalism and move directly on to socialism, the members of the HSRA were impatient. Unlike Mao, who came from a peasant family and understood the peasant’s political culture, these individuals were from the upper classes. They did not bother to emulate the Russians or the Chinese, who were both politically organized. As a result, the majority of their actions were attached to nationalist goals rather than a more universal revolutionary conscience.
The allusion to the “Philosophy of the Bomb” manifesto deserves a brief exploration. In 1929, the HSRA tried blowing up the vice-regal special train. Gandhi was horrified by this event and gave a speech at a meeting of the Indian Congress, where he rejected terrorism. Gandhi declaimed the terrorists as cowards, adding that he would abandon the path of nonviolence were he not certain that bomb-throwing was futile, nothing more than “froth coming to the surface in an agitated liquid.” In the same speech, Gandhi seemed to foretell his own death. He noted that the logical consequence of killing foreigners was attacking perceived interlopers in India, people the terrorists believed impeded their revolutionary aims. This is exactly what happened to Gandhi in 1948.
Indian terrorists were not fond of these arguments. They countered that terrorism was not a foreign import. It was a homegrown strategy necessary for political change: “Terrorism instills fear in the hearts of the oppressors, it brings hope of revenge and redemption to the oppressed masses. It gives courage and self-confidence to the wavering, it shatters the spell of the subject race in the eyes of the world, because it is the most convincing proof of a nation’s hunger for freedom.” Echoing their manifesto, these individuals argued that the Indian peasantry lacked the education to understand the religious significance of Gandhi’s message of peace and that talk about love for one’s fellow human beings would do nothing to convince the British to end their violence against India. They then uttered the age-old argument used by terrorists. They noted that given all the atrocities the British monarchy had meted out to India, their violence was justified morally: “As a race and as a people we stand dishonored and outraged. Do people still expect us to forget and to forgive? We shall have our revenge, a people’s righteous revenge on the tyrant.” They noted as well, citing Russia and Turkey, that violence could be a means for achieving social progress in spite of Gandhi’s rebukes.
It goes without saying that in the historic battle of ideologies, Gandhi’s message resonated better. Gandhi’s superior organizational abilities and his appeals to the masses were hard to beat. Regardless, the HSRA disseminated their manifesto, and it did inspire a few attacks, including the murder of a police officer in Lahore in 1928 and the bomb attack on the Central Legislative Assembly by Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt. When arrested, they claimed they wanted to give voice to the voiceless and gave a mishmash of historical examples ranging from George Washington and Giuseppe Garibaldi to Kemal Pasha and Guru Gobind Singh. Following this, the HSRA conducted the 1930 Chittagong raid. The Calcutta Jugantar Party, inspired by their ideology, wrote a similar manifesto. But by the mid-1930s, the British had blunted their efforts and rendered Gandhi’s movement less effective as well. Terrorism had one last outburst during World War II, but after independence and partition, terrorism metastasized into various forms of repression and civil war.