Ashfaqulla Khan Was Pressed to Turn on His Hindu Comrades in the Kakori Case. He Refused, and the Raj Hanged Him at 27.

On 16 December 1927, in Gorakhpur jail, Ram Prasad Bismil wrote down the hour fixed for his own hanging: six o’clock in the morning of Monday, 19 December. He was finishing an autobiography written secretly on death row, and one chapter of it speaks to another man, in the second person, from its first line.

“I remember well that when I came to Shahjahanpur after the royal proclamation, I met you at school,” the chapter begins. “You very much wanted to meet me. You wanted to talk about the Mainpuri conspiracy. Wondering why a Muslim schoolboy should talk to me like this, I answered you dismissively.”

The chapter is headed “Ashfaq”. The man it addresses, Ashfaqulla Khan, was in Faizabad jail, under sentence of death in the same case. Every passage from Bismil’s book below is the tuput Editors’ translation of the Hindi text on Gadya Kosh. Penguin India published an English edition in 2025 as A Glimpse of My Life.

A landlord’s son, a police raid and a rebuff

Ashfaqulla was born on 22 October 1900 in Shahjahanpur, in the United Provinces, to Shafiqullah Khan and Mazharunissa, in a wealthy landlord family. ThePrint adds that his father’s family were Pathans and that his mother’s family served in the colonial administration.

His turn to revolution began at school. As a seventh-standard pupil he met revolutionary politics when police raided the school to arrest a student, Rajaram Bhartiya, who was wanted in the Mainpuri conspiracy case of 1918, and he began looking for revolutionary groups in the province. Through a friend, Banarsilal, he sought an introduction to Bismil, who had been declared an absconder in that case. Banarsilal later became a Crown witness against the Kakori men.

Bismil came home to Shahjahanpur in February 1920, after a general pardon by the king freed the Mainpuri prisoners, ten months after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Tripathy and Agarwal, whose 2020 essay in Janata Weekly draws on Ashfaqulla’s own writings, say Bismil was at first reluctant to meet him and suspicious of why a Muslim wanted to join the revolutionary party, and Bismil’s own chapter says as much.

Shuddhi, kafir and a fever

The younger man did not give up. “In a short time you became like my younger brother,” Bismil wrote, adding that Ashfaqulla’s elder brother had been his classmate in Urdu middle school. “Everyone was astonished that a staunch Arya Samaji and a Muslim should be friends. I used to perform shuddhi of Muslims. I lived in the Arya Samaj temple.” Shuddhi, literally purification, was the Arya Samaj rite for taking Muslims back into Hinduism.

“You did not care about any of that,” he went on. “Some of my companions looked at you with hatred because you were a Muslim, but you stood firm.” When a Hindu-Muslim quarrel broke out, Bismil wrote, everyone in Ashfaqulla’s own neighbourhood abused him openly and called him a kafir, an unbeliever, “but you never once agreed with their views.”

Many in town wondered whether he would convert. “Many suspected you might give up Islam and be purified. But your heart was not impure in any way, so what would you have been purified of?” “There was no difference between you and me. We often ate from one plate. The idea that there is any difference between Hindu and Muslim left my heart.”

During an attack of palpitations, Bismil adds, Ashfaqulla lay unconscious calling out “Ram, haay Ram” while relatives urged him to say “Allah, Allah.” He always called Bismil “Ram” and could not bring himself to use his name. A friend who knew this fetched Bismil, and the patient calmed down.

The Khan family tells a matching story. Afaqullah Khan, the grandson of Ashfaqulla’s elder brother Riyasatullah, told PTI in 2025 that Bismil would perform havan at the Arya Samaj temple in Shahjahanpur while Ashfaqulla offered namaz in the same place. A few months before Kakori, he said, a mob attacked the temple, and Ashfaqulla “was the first to face the mob.” For the longer history of shared shrines and saints behind a friendship like this one, see when Hindus and Muslims shared saints.

The poet who read Horatius

Hasrat and Warsi were the pen names under which Ashfaqulla wrote Urdu verse. His surviving prose comes from an edited volume, Amar Shahid Ashfakulla Khan, compiled by Banarsidas Chaturvedi and published by Rajkamal Prakashan. Two researchers at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Harshvardhan Tripathy and Prabal Saran Agarwal, translated his words from the Urdu in consultation with a Jamia Millia Islamia scholar, and every sentence of his below is quoted in their English.

They trace his patriotism to two poems: Walter Scott’s “Love of Country”, which he read in the eighth standard, and Macaulay’s Horatius, about the Roman who defended Rome against an Etruscan army, which he cited twice in his writings. “This poem became the foundation of my love for [the] nation,” he wrote in a short tract on the Mainpuri conspiracy. Of the young men the government called seditionists or anarchists, he wrote: “These young men would have been recognized as nation-builders if they had been born in a free country!”

One belief he later dropped. The last piece of his prison autobiography records that in his youth he had prayed for the Turks to win and rule India: “I used to think and pray that Turks should win and establish suzerainty over India.” Of that wish he said: “I think I was being idiotic and foolish as I wanted to throw the chains of slavery of one and embrace the other.”

Over the following years, the same essay says, he and Bismil joined the Non-Cooperation movement, campaigned for the Swaraj Party in municipal elections, marched through Shahjahanpur district after riots, and worked together in the Hindustan Republican Association. The Congress party’s tribute page says he helped found that body in 1924.

Ten men, a chain and a guard on the ground

Bismil worked out the plan, he says, from a railway timetable. The train from Saharanpur to Lucknow, he reckoned, must collect at least ten thousand rupees along the way, so he settled on stopping it by pulling the chain and robbing the guard’s safe. Ten young men did it, in his account.

Ashfaqulla was not keen at first. Harshvardhan, writing in National Herald in 2021, says he opposed the action because the party lacked the resources to face the government’s reaction, and that once the committee decided on it he took part fully and was the man who broke open the heavy locker. Afaqullah Khan gave PTI the same sequence of doubt followed by persuasion: Bismil “convinced him that the action was for the larger good of the freedom struggle.”

Bismil’s own telling has an edge of comedy aimed at the rulers. When the guard tried to climb back onto the train he was ordered to lie on the ground, so the train could not leave without him. Fourteen passengers carried guns or rifles, he wrote, and two armed British soldiers were aboard, but everyone stayed quiet. The driver lay down in the engine and the engineer hid in the lavatory, and “both of them were English.”

Not everything went to plan. A passenger, Ahmad Ali, was shot. Judge A. H. Hamilton, in the judgment the Indian Quarterly Register later reproduced, thought it improbable that Ahmad Ali was deliberately aimed at, but wrote that the shooting along the sides of the train “showed a disregard of human life.”

Thirty arrests in a day, and a friend in Delhi

The police answer came on 26 September 1925. According to Bismil, a CID officer named Horton had about thirty people arrested across the province in one sweep. The Quarterly Register gives the same date for the warrants and says they were executed the next day.

Twenty-six men were sent up before a special magistrate, and three had vanished: Sachindranath Bakshi, Chandrashekhar Azad and Ashfaqulla, in Bismil’s list. Two others turned approvers, meaning Crown witnesses who testify in return for a pardon, and the Register names them as Banarsilal and Indubhushan Mitra, both of Shahjahanpur. Banwari Lal confessed and was given five years.

Judgment came on 6 April 1927. Hamilton, sitting as special judge in Lucknow, sentenced three men to be hanged: Bismil, Rajendra Lahiri and Roshan Singh. One was transported for life and most of the others got prison terms. The dock did not hold Ashfaqulla.

Ashfaqulla, by Tripathy and Agarwal’s account, had gone to Nepal, then to Kanpur, where he met the editor Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, then to Daltonganj in Palamau, where he worked about six months as a clerk under an assumed name. In Delhi, on his way abroad, the friend he was staying with betrayed him to the police.

The date of the arrest is not settled. Several accounts say 7 December 1926, while the Congress party’s own tribute page says 17 July 1926. Writing in SabrangIndia, Nikhat Fatima says the friend wanted the reward the British had put on Ashfaqulla’s head.

The offer

Accounts of what happened in custody do not agree on who made the approach. Harshvardhan says a Muslim magistrate in the Kakori trials tried to persuade Ashfaqulla to turn approver, and quotes his answer: “I am lone Muslim [accused in the Kakori Conspiracy Case] and that is why my responsibilities are huge. If I do something wrong [by becoming an approver] then entire Muslim community will be smeared. Let me die with respect.”

Fatima says it was a prison superintendent, who promised help in securing his release if he testified against Bismil and warned him that Bismil, a staunch Hindu, wanted nothing but Hindu rule. Neither writer names a document, and the officer’s rank differs between them, so the words are reported tradition. Longer speeches put in his mouth by other retellings cite nothing, and tuput does not quote them.

Bismil’s own record points the same way. The captain of the CID met him in jail, Bismil wrote, and said he wanted to make him a government witness. The closing chapter adds that the government itself had declared Ashfaqulla Ram Prasad’s right hand, and asks what follows from that: “If Ashfaqulla, a staunch Muslim, could become the right hand of a firm Arya Samaji in the revolutionary party, then why could Hindus and Muslims not unite, forgetting their small private gains, in the name of the freedom of a new India?”

Condemned cells in Lucknow

Ashfaqulla was tried after the main case, and Bismil summed up the trial in one sentence: “The court held you to be my lieutenant, and the judge, while writing the verdict, put the garland of victory, the hangman’s rope, round your neck.”

The Chief Court heard the appeals. On 23 August 1927 the Home Member, Mr Crerar, told the Legislative Assembly that the Kakori case had “concluded only yesterday.” Crerar used it as an argument against repealing part of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, saying the case “proved the existence of one or more associations of a dangerous character.” During the appeal, the two men spent several days in condemned cells at Lucknow jail, facing each other.

Pleas for mercy followed. The list, as Bismil gives it, runs to a memorial signed by nearly all the elected members of the United Provinces Council, one signed by 78 members of the Legislative Assembly and the Council of State, and a separate petition his own father sent with the signatures of 250 rais (men of standing), honorary magistrates and landlords. Madan Mohan Malaviya and other Assembly members met the Viceroy. The provincial government listened to none of it, Bismil wrote, and the Viceroy did not either. An appeal to the Privy Council in London was dismissed.

The Assembly memorial rested on the sessions judge’s remark that the government might reduce punishment for those who repented, and Ashfaqulla did not want to make that plea. “Ashfaqulla Khan was not willing to petition the English government for mercy,” Bismil wrote. Ashfaqulla’s settled belief was that one should pray to no one but God. “Only at my special insistence did he petition. I alone am to blame for having used the sacred right of my affection to shake Ashfaq from his firm resolve.” A letter of apology went from Gorakhpur jail on Bhai Dooj, Bismil said, though only God knew whether it reached him.

A message out of Faizabad jail

From Faizabad, a few days before the hanging, Ashfaqulla smuggled out a last message to the country. Tripathy and Agarwal’s translation has him writing of the freedom he wanted: “I want that kind of freedom for Hindustan where [the] poor should live happily and with ease.” The day he prayed for was one when “Abdullah mechanic of loco workshop, Dhaniya cobbler and common peasants” would be seen sitting on chairs in front of Khaliq-uz-Zaman, Jagat Narain Mulla and the Raja of Mahmudabad in Lucknow’s Chhatar Manzil. Addressing the communists, he wrote: “my heart always weeps for the poor peasants and helpless workers.”

On the quarrels dividing Hindus and Muslims, in a passage Tripathy and Agarwal take from Shamsul Islam’s study of his martyrdom, he wrote: “it is impossible that 7 crore Muslims can be converted to Hinduism and 22 crore Hindus can be turned into Muslims.” A Hindi “last message” circulates online with a line about being the first Muslim to go to the gallows. It is not in any text we could open, so it is not quoted here.

The prison autobiography goes further. “If India attains freedom and instead of [the] British, our own people come to occupy the Government and the discrimination on the basis of rich and poor and between landlord and peasants remains,” he wrote, “I would pray to God that don’t grant us freedom until equality gets established.”

Bismil’s own last chapter argues that the government’s use of the quarrels between the two communities had backfired. Lord Birkenhead, he wrote, had been moved to exploit them and tighten India’s chains, and he quoted an Urdu saying: “They went to get out of the fast and got the prayers hung round their necks.” Leaders of both communities, he asked, should meet at the next Congress, at Madras, to remember the Kakori men, and he vouched for his friend: “What I am saying is also the opinion of Ashfaqulla Khan Warsi.” Hindu-Muslim unity, Bismil wrote, was “our memorial and our last wish, however hard it may be to attain.” Whether the British had in fact set out to use the quarrel is the subject of the divide that was designed.

19 December 1927

The four men died in three places. Bismil was hanged at Gorakhpur, Ashfaqulla at Faizabad and Roshan Singh at Allahabad, all on 19 December. Rajendra Lahiri had been hanged two days earlier at Gonda.

Before the end, a letter went to Sachindranath Bakshi’s elder sister, whom Ashfaqulla regarded as his own. ETV Bharat reproduces it in English: “The hanging will take place on 19th December in Faizabad jail. I wish that when my body is brought to Lucknow railway station, you must come to meet me.” A great-grandson, also named Ashfaqulla Khan, told ETV Bharat that when Ashfaqulla was asked for a last wish he replied, “if I have any wish, then it is that someone please keep the remains of the country in my shroud.” The account comes through the family and rests on no document.

Afaqullah Khan told PTI that the will asked that one child in each generation of the family be named Ashfaqullah. The family waited a generation, because the name would revive sad memories, and then honoured it.

On 26 December 1927, a week after the hangings, the Indian National Congress opened its session at Madras under Dr M. A. Ansari. The Quarterly Register records that the first resolutions, passed unanimously without debate, included one putting on record “its sense of deep pain at the callous attitude of the Government in not commuting the brutal sentences passed in the Kakori case.” Tripathy and Agarwal add that the Hindustan Republican Association was afterwards renamed the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, under the leadership of Bhagat Singh and Azad.

A stamp in 1997, statues in 2026

India Post issued a 200 paise stamp for Bismil and Ashfaqullah Khan on 19 December 1997, the seventieth anniversary of the hangings.

Statues of Bismil, Ashfaqulla and Roshan Singh outside the municipal corporation office in Shahjahanpur were pulled down in March 2026 by a contractor on a road project. The Free Press Journal reported that municipal sources described a ₹40 lakh smart road scheme, said the statues were removed without informing senior officials and damaged in the process, and said the contractor had planned to put them up again at a different location.