Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 99
Hindu working men there:' among whom he was gaining
three to four hundred new "converts" each week to "the
economic ideals of the Revolutionary Party ofIndia-the
Ghadr Party," and also asked Brooks to forward Aldred
some of the Ghadar literature.44 The movement's takeoff
was meteoric; but that story must be told elsewhere.
On March 25, 1914, just as it was picking up steam, a
warrant went out for Har Dayal's arrest and deportation.
After Leon Czolgosz killed President McKinley in 1901,
a law had been passed allowing deportation within three
years of entry to the United States, of any anarchist alien
for whom there was "local evidence of belonging to any
revolutionary society."45 The Ghadarites' nemesis William
Hopkinson, a Canadian undercover agent with police experience
in Calcutta-allegedly he could pass as a Sikhsuggested
this strategem, since Har Dayal's views and
associations were well known.
The evidence for his deportation case included letters
written in his hand, purportedly discovered among
Alexander Berkman's and Goldman's personal effects.
Any real connection is apocryphal, although Har Dayal
did at least attempt to make contact. Later, two letters he
posted from Netherlands in 1916 to Berkman were used
as proof in the wartime Hindu-German conspiracy case,
even though these had been deployed less to link Har
Dayal to anarchists than to link Goldman and Berkman
to Germany. Goldman herself dismissed the letters, and
when confronted, claimed to remember Har Dayal vaguely
only as a "great idealist" and "Tolstoyan" whom she had
met in California.46