On this date in 1915, Indian revolutionary Pandit Kanshi Ram was hanged by the British.
Present on the U.S. west coast for the founding of the heavily Sikh revolutionary Ghadar Party, Ram repatriated to participate in that clique’s eponymous Ghadar Mutiny.
This attempt to incite rebellion in the Raj was heavily surveilled, and crushed at the outset. The result was a series of trials bringing 20+ executions in 1915 known as the Lahore Conspiracy trials. (It’s not to be confused with the Delhi-Lahore Conspiracy.) “The British as a nation, all white men as a race and the English Government in particular, are all maligned in a spirit born of a depraved nature,” fumed the first court, the one that condemned Pandit Kanshi Ram. “Facts are not only distorted but most maliciously perverted to appeal to the lowest passions of Indian subjects. In the most open, defiant and unmasked manner mutiny is preached. “
On this day..
- 1940: The Sass Brothers, Weimar burglars
- 1728: Five at Tyburn
- 1634: John Bartendale survives hanging and burial
- 1894: Walter Smith
- 1889: Mark Francis and James Turney
- 1878: The Brassell boys
- 1811: Adam Lyal, highwayman
- 1947: Hisakazu Tanaka, Hong Kong occupier
- 1677: Giles Bland
- 2009: Two thieves in Riyadh
- 1836: Goliad Massacre
- 2001: Robert Lee Massie, who spent a lifetime dying