Ashfaqulla Khan

01Bismil’s friend

Ashfaqulla was the youngest son of a Pathan family of Shahjahanpur. He wrote Urdu verse under the pen-name Hasrat. As a schoolboy he sought out Ram Prasad Bismil, an Arya Samaji poet of the same town, and the two became inseparable; people said Bismil’s Hindu prayers and Ashfaq’s namaz were offered side by side. After Gandhi called off non-cooperation in 1922, both turned to armed revolution and joined the Hindustan Republican Association.

02Kakori and Faizabad

To fund the party, the HRA decided to take the government’s own money. On 9 August 1925 they stopped the 8 Down Saharanpur–Lucknow train at Kakori and carried off the treasury bags from the guard’s van; Ashfaq broke open the iron chest. Most of the party was rounded up within weeks. Ashfaq stayed underground for over a year and was arrested in Delhi in 1926. Offered leniency if he turned against Bismil, he refused. He was hanged in Faizabad jail on 19 December 1927, going to the gallows with the Quran in his hand.

Battle · 9 August 1925Kakori Train ActionTen young revolutionaries stopped a train near Kakori and took the government treasury bags to fund an armed struggle for a free Indian republic.Read →