CHAPTER XVI HINDU-GERMAN CONSPIRACIES
The Society for Advancement in India—"Gaekwar Scholarships"—Har Dyal and Gadhr—India in 1914—Papen's report—German and Hindu agents sent to the Orient—Gupta in Japan—The raid on von Igel's office—Chakravarty replaces Gupta—The Annie Larsen and Maverick filibuster—Von Igel's memoranda—Har Dyal in Berlin—A request for anarchist agents—Ram Chandra—Plots against the East and West Indies—Correspondence between Bernstorff and Berlin, 1916—Designs on China, Japan and Africa—Chakravarty arrested—The conspirators indicted.
As far back as 1907 a plot was hatched in the United States to promote sedition and unrest in British India. The chief agitators had the effrontery in the following year to make their headquarters in rooms in the New York Bar Association, and to issue from that address numerous circulars asking for money. The late John L. Cadwallader, of the distinguished law firm of Cadwallader, Wickersham and Taft, was then president of the Bar Association, and when he learned of the Hindu activities under the roof of the association he swiftly evicted the ringleaders. Their organization, chartered in November, 1907, was called The Society for the Advancement of India. One of its officers was a New York man to whom the British have since refused permission to visit India. Its members included several college professors.
The presence of several educators in the list may be accounted for by the fact that the society existed apparently for the purpose of supplying American college training to selected Hindu youths. Many of them were sent to the United States at the expense of the Gaekwar of Baroda, one of the richest and most influential of the Indian princes; the Gaekwar's own son was a student in Harvard College in the years 1908-1912. Considerable sums of money were solicited from worthy folk who believed that they were furthering the cause of enlightenment in India; others who sincerely believed that British rule was tyrannical gave frankly to the society to help an Indian nationalist movement for home rule; others contributed freely for the promotion of any and every anti-British propaganda in India. The source of the latter funds may be suggested by the understanding which long existed between the Society for the Advancement of India and the Clan-na-Gael, an understanding witnessed by the frequent quotation in the disaffected press of India of articles from the Gaelic-American. Another successful solicitor was a contemptible Swami, Vivekahanda, who discussed soul matters to New York's gullible-rich to his great profit until the police gathered him in for a very earthly and material offense. But the students were the best material for revolt, whether it was to be social or military, and we shall see presently how they were made use of.
The Gaekwar of Baroda came to America in the first decade of the new century and expressed freely at that time his dislike for the British. At the time of the Muzaffarpur bomb outrage, in which the wife and daughter of an English official were killed, the police found in the outskirts of Calcutta a Hindu who had been educated at an American college at the Gaekwar's expense and who was at that time conducting a school of instruction in the use of explosives and small arms; he even had considerable quantities of American arms and ammunition stored in his house. The youths who held "Gaekwar scholarships" in America were under the general oversight of a professor attached to the American Museum of Natural History, and the accumulation of evidence of the activities of the students finally caused his removal.
The Society established branches in Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and even in St. John, New Brunswick, and it thrived on the Pacific Coast. Within the purlieus of the University of California, there lived in 1913 one Har Dyal, a graduate of St. John's college at Oxford. Har Dyal in that year founded a publication called Gadhr, which being translated means "mutiny," its main edition published in Urdu, other editions published in other vernaculars, and appealing not only to Hindus, but to Sikhs and Moslems. The publication and the chief exponents of its thought formed the nucleus of a considerable system of anti-British activity.
Whatever was anti-British found a warm reception in Berlin. England, in August and September, 1914, was wrestling heroically with the problem of supplying men to the Continent before the German drive should reach the Channel. Her regulars went, and the training of that gallant "first hundred thousand" followed. She combed her colonies for troops, and having an appreciable force of well-trained native soldiers under arms in India, she brought them to France, and the chronicles of the war are already full of stories of the splendid fighting they did, and the annoyance they caused to the grey troops of Germany. From the German standpoint it was good strategy to incite discontent in India, both as tending to remove the Hindu and Sikh regiments from the fighting zone, and as distracting England's attention from the main issue by making her look to the preservation of one of her richest treasure lands; there was the further possibility, after the expected elimination of Russia, of German conquest of India, and a German trade route from the Baltic to the Bay of Bengal, through the Himalayan passes. Germany seized upon the opportunity. The Amir of Afghanistan had trained his army under Turkish officers, themselves instructed by Germany through the forces of Enver Pasha. The Afghans were told that the Kaiser was Mohammedan, and by the faith prepared to smite down the wicked unbeliever, England. The Amir himself spoiled Germany's designs among his people, however, for upon the outbreak of the war he pledged his neutrality to the British Government, and he kept his word.