Haj to Utopia. Maia Ramnath

In order to focus on these projects we must first return to California, since it was through the Hindu-German Conspiracy trial in San Francisco, extending from November 1917 to April 1918, that the hidden events in East Asia entered the recorded narrative.

      THE EASTERN FRONT

      The BIC’s East Asian initiatives were the ones most closely associated with the Californian branch of the movement abroad, second only to the initial mutiny attempt, which preceded any German role. East Asia was strategically important from the perspectives of both California and Berlin, due to the large number of Sikh and Muslim troops stationed in Burma and Malaya as military police, or as watchmen in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the other British treaty ports of China.²³ There were also significant numbers of Indian laborers in the Philippines. Well before the war, in 1913, G. D. Kumar sailed from San Francisco for Manila, where he informed Taraknath Das in a letter that he was “going to establish a base … [to] supervise the work near China, Hong Kong, Shanghai. Professor Barakatullah is all right in Japan.”²⁴ These cities, emerging as “subsidiary bases in the Ghadar network,”²⁵ were to serve as recruitment centers (garnering as many as six or seven hundred new activists),²⁶ propaganda distribution points, and intermediary links between San Francisco and India.²⁷ When C arrived in San Francisco in late 1914, several missions were already in the works: some to Shanghai via Japan to collect India-bound recruits; others to scout landing places in Java for arms and ammunition. Ram Chandra tasked C himself to go to Sumatra, where he was to contact the German consul for money and then go about the same tasks of recruitment, location scouting, and establishing contact with India.

      Meanwhile, Bhagwan Singh nurtured a secret society in Shanghai until a few emissaries arrived from California to formalize a Ghadar branch there.²⁸ When he arrived in late spring or summer 1915 on the island of Sulu “in a small boat laden with range-finders and other military equipments and maps,” his destination was the Dutch East Indies.²⁹ Sent back to the Philippines after an arrest (for “trying to leave by an unopened port”),³⁰ he then proceeded to build Manila into one of the strongest Ghadar organizing centers in East Asia. In May 1915 the British consul at Manila wrote to the viceroy that Bhagwan Singh had turned up there accompanied by his friend Dost Mahommed, who was employed there as a watchman. Bhagwan Singh meanwhile had no apparent occupation other than propaganda work, distributing pamphlets to his countrymen, addressing small meetings, and collecting money for the cause. Many Ghadar issues had been posted from Manila into India, “wrapped well inside local papers and addressed not to the intended recipients, whose correspondence might be examined, but to unsuspected and inactive sympathizers, who would arrange for the transmission.”³¹ Those watching his movements reported him a frequent visitor to both the headquarters of the Indian Association of the Philippines and the local German consulate, which provided him with money.³²

      MAP 2. Northeast invasion