Encounters with Ghadar

Counterpunch, December 18, 2007

By VIJAY PRASHAD

Last year, I wrote an essay for CounterPunch about the Indo-US agreement. It began with the bravery of my friends Bela Malik and Tommy Mathew, whose protest in Jangpura drew the might of the US secret service and the Delhi police. Bela, an editor and teacher, went into a coma shortly afterwards. She was then in Nepal, where she threw herself into the democracy movement (for those in Kathmandu, there will be a memorial for her at Martin Chautari on the 22nd at 11am). An incandescent light, Bela slipped away on December 16, 2007. She was my first editor and a dear friend. Many years ago, we chatted about the Ghadar movement while roaming around Delhi. This essay helps me remember her humor and intelligence, and above all, her commitment.

A few years ago, I sat with Kartar Dhillon in her modest home in Berkeley, California. Kartar, who has lived a very full political life, told me about her brother, Budh. In 1924, twelve-year old Budh marched down to 5, Wood Street in San Francisco to a building known as the Ghadar Ashram. There he volunteered to join a jatha to go and liberate India, a country that he had not yet visited. It was the homeland of his parents, and he told his sister that unless this country was free, their lives in the U. S. would not be pleasant. People would treat them as coolies as long as India remained in British hands. Along with another teenager, Daswanda Singh Mann, Budh joined the Freedom for India Mission and set off across the Pacific Ocean. He did not get to India. En route, through the young Soviet Union, Budh got distracted. The route into India was closed, so he enrolled in the University of Toilers of the East and learnt a little bit about Marxism. Budh Dhillon returned to California and spent the rest of his life as an active militant for freedom and justice for all people.

Of such souls was the Ghadar Party made.

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