हिंदीOn this day
Standing

Kakori

The town near Lucknow where, on 9 August 1925, revolutionaries of the Hindustan Republican Association stopped a train and took the government treasury it carried. Four of them, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Rajendra Lahiri and Roshan Singh, were hanged for it in December 1927.

Built: Old town west of Lucknow; train action of 9 August 1925Where: Uttar Pradesh26.88° N, 80.80° E
  1. 9 August 1925
  2. 26 September 1925
  3. 17–19 December 1927
  4. August 2021
Photo: Yann (talk) · Public domain

019 August 1925

The Hindustan Republican Association, founded by Ram Prasad Bismil and his comrades in 1924, needed money for arms and chose to take it from the government, not from Indians. On the evening of 9 August 1925 ten of its members boarded the Number 8 Down train from Shahjahanpur to Lucknow. Near Kakori one of them pulled the chain. They held the guard, broke open the iron chest of railway cash and carried it off; a passenger, Ahmad Ali, was killed by a stray shot. Chandrashekhar Azad was among them. The raid shook the government, which brought the full force of the police on the province.

02The trial and the gallows

Arrests began on 26 September 1925, and some forty men were tried in Lucknow in the Kakori Conspiracy Case. Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Rajendra Lahiri and Thakur Roshan Singh were sentenced to death, and others to long terms; Azad alone was never caught. Lahiri was hanged at Gonda on 17 December 1927, and on 19 December Bismil at Gorakhpur, Ashfaqulla at Faizabad and Roshan Singh at Allahabad. The friendship of Bismil, an Arya Samaji, and Ashfaqulla, a Muslim, became part of the story of the freedom movement. A memorial to the martyrs stands near Kakori, and in 2021 the Uttar Pradesh government renamed the event the Kakori Train Action.

The life of this place

  1. 9 August 1925HRA revolutionaries take the treasury from the train near Kakori.
  2. 26 September 1925Mass arrests begin.
  3. 17–19 December 1927Lahiri, Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan and Roshan Singh are hanged.
  4. August 2021The event is officially renamed the Kakori Train Action.

People

Ram Prasad BismilFreedom fighter
11 June 1897 – 19 December 1927

Ram Prasad Bismil

Poet-revolutionary, leader of the Kakori action

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