Saturday, April 13, 2013

Chittagong Armoury Raid - Binod Bihari Chowdri

    It was the time when number of leftist thinkers started occupying Indian National Congress. The Indian National Movement started to take a socialist orientation. It was about 12 days after Gandhi had broken the British Salt Tax, a revolutionary moment took place in Bengal. The revolutionaries are the people who were not satisfied with Moderates as well as Extremist methods of Indian National Congress. It was 10 PM 18 Apr 1930, a group of ten men led by Ganesh Ghosh had captured the police armoury and as per plan another group led by Lokenath Bal had captured the Auxiliary Forces armoury. The telephone and telegraph wire were cut, so that the train movement was disrupted. The next step was to kill the Europeans at their club's headquarters. But it was Good Friday most of the Europeans were at their home and called backup troops from Calcutta, this was not expected by the revolutionary group. Through this raid the revolutionaries had captured the European club's headquarters in the Name of Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch. Surya sen or Masterda took the military salute outside the headquarters and the group marched towards the hills for safety.

    Soon after few days the revolutionaries were surrounded by the British troops. Some of them (Pritilata Waddedar) consumed cynade to avoid arrest, few (Harigopal Bal) were killed by the British troops and the rest were tried and punished. The leader Masterda was brutally tortured before hanged. After serving their sentences few of the group members (Binod Bihari Chowdhury, Lokenath Bal) were joined in Indian National Congress and few of them (Kalpana Datta, Ganesh Ghosh, Ambika Chakrabarty, Ananta Lal Sinha, Subodh Roy) joined Communist Party of India.


    Today (i.e., 10 Apr 2013) one of the group member of "Chittagong Armoury Raid", Binod Bihari Chowdhury has passed away. During partition he stayed back in East Pakisthan and in 2000 he was conferred with Independence Day Award one of the highest civilian award in Bangladesh.



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