Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

152 I Ramnath
organisation."''! Ye t these were the same writings fo r which
Santokh Singh had expressed approval before his death,
suggesting that although Josh made no small contribution
to Ghadar-Kirti's Marxist-Leninist reorientation, perhaps
it was Bhagat Singh's less orthodox philosophical synthesis
that had more continuity with Ghadar's earlier manifestation.
In any case, what he described sounds very much lih
the melange of ideological ingredients that had informed
Ghadarite writings prior to the war, as he himself would
not have denied; like Bhagat Singh, he was then "under the
spell of the Ghadar Party ideology and [Ghadar martyr]
Kartar Singh Sarabha was the common hero to both of us."
While Josh might have considered this a sign of political
immaturity, it could also be interpreted as an illustration
of a consistent alternative sustained over a long period.
To Josh's dismay, even after he himself had abandoned it,
"some Kirti poets . .. remain[ed] anarchist."60
Singh had played a founding role in a Lahore-based
youth group, the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, whose main goal
was the establishment of an independent peasants' and
workers' republic in India. In 1928, at historiL meetings in
Amritsar and Delhi, the Sabha joined forces with the Kirti
group as well as the United Provinces-based Hindustan
Republican Association (established in 1924), which
simultaneously renamed itself the Hindustan Socialist
Republican Association (HSRA). The boundaries between
the three now more or less dissolved. Sixty people attended
the first meeting, including "rural and urban middle-class
youth" along with "Singh's group of individual activists:'
from which they adapted the Sabha's name.61 At the same