Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

98 I Ramnath
the same. As for the Russians, they "daily shoot Governors,
police commissioners, spies, etc., like little birds of prey and
the people applaud . ... [T Jhe Indians should become disciples
of the Russians." He reserved special praise for women
like Sophia Perovskaya and Vera Zasulich, "who were
worshiped like goddesses by the people." Har Dayal also
drew eclectically on Hyndman, Kropotkin, and sacred poet
Matthew Arnold to legitimate the distinction between
an act of murder and one of justice, and offered a litany of
regicidal heroes, including the anarchist assassins of King
Umberto ontall" President William McKinley, and Czar
Alexander 11.11
Indian revolutionaries could not afford to wait around
fo r Germany and Britain to come to blows, as they were
bound to do eventually, he insisted. In the meantime, "in
Asiatic countries the appearance of the bomb is the advance
guard of complete liberty."
Ghadar member Rattan Singh and Ghadar historian
Harish Puri (among many other Left critics of propaganda
of the deed) later called this vanguardist approach a symptom
of the "desperation" that springs from tht" y:1wning
absence of a mass revolutionary movement. What changed
circa 1912 was precisely the emergence of an opportunity
to organize such a movement. The several thousand
Indian agricultural and lumber workers on the We st Coast
were dry tinder ready for a spark, as they began to articulate
the links between the racial discrimination they faced
in California, and the colonial status of their country of
origin. Har Dayal wrote to Aldred in December 1913, reporting
on "his work on the Coast, especially among the