Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

156 I Ramnath
Zindabad!" (Hindi/Urdu fo r "viva la revoluci6n"), "Down
with British Imperialism !" and "Workers of the World,
Unite!" Rather than trying to escape, they submitted
willingly to arrest; the plan all along had been to use the
subsequent trial "as a forum from which to proclaim their
programme to the nation and rouse it to action."('9
During the trial, the defendants freely acknowledged
throwing the bombs, but insisted that their intentions
could be amply shown by the results: no one was injured
beyond "slight abrasions in less than half a dozen cases . ...
Loaded with an effective charge of potassium chlorate and
sensitive picrate, the bombs would have smashed the barriers
and laid many low within some yards of the explosion.
Again, had they been loaded with some other high explosive
with a charge of destructive pellets or darts, they would
have sufficed to wipe our a majority of the members of the
Legislative Assembly."7ll The level of detail in the statement
seems calculated to demonstrate that they could have constructed
a maximally lethal bomb had they so chosen, but
did not, just as they had aimed their throws carefully behind
the president's bench to avoid human targets. So \'lhile echo
ing the philosophy of propaganda of the deed, they had gone
well beyond the fetishization of the blast evident in Har
Dayal's 1912 pamphlet. The often-quoted leaflet distributed
in the assembly along with the bombs proclaimed, "It takes
a loud voice to make the deaf hear. With these immortal
words uttered on a similar occasion by Vaillant, a French
anarchist martyr, do we strongly justify this action of ourS." 7l
Indeed movement participant Shiv Varma claimed
that of the HSRA group at Lahore, "Bhagat Singh and