Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 147
Singh was born in 1907, to a political family-both
his father and uncle were committed radicals, with tight
Ghadar movement links. He idolized the revolutionaries
who frequented their home, and resolved early on to
emulate them. Eagerly he joined in the first great wave
of mobilizations of the mature freedom movement, the
Noncooperation movement kicked offby Gandhi in 1920
in coalition with the Khilafat movement.
But Gandhi called a halt on the growing resistance
when protesters burned a police station in a small town in
northern India, resulting in the death of twenty-three officers.
For Gandhi, a movement marred by violence was not
worth continuing, even though as rank-and-file activists
well know, then and now, it is the police who most often
make the first move when a protest "turns violent." In this
case, a few people had acted in retaliation for police firing
on a demonstration, killing three and wounding others.
Gandhi's willful postponement (as Singh and many young
noncooperators saw it) of independence in 1922 prodded
protesters in more militant directions. Those dissatisfied
with the meekness of Congress, yet bound by political
principle to reject religiously framed mobilization, began
forming "small, compact groups" for "revolutionary action."
Singh was a member of one such group, along with some
friends he met while studying history and politics at the
National College in Lahore. (Bhai Parmanand was one of
his mentors there, as he had earlier been Har Dayal's.)
Fleeing school in 1924 to escape the confinement of
an unwanted arranged marriage, he joined a radical circle
in Kanpur around journalist and activist Ganesh Shanker