Chandrashekhar Azad Evaded the Police for More Than Five Years After Kakori. It Took Them Half an Hour to Stop Him in Alfred Park, and the Records Still Disagree on Who Fired the Last Shot

The Indian Annual Register, a yearbook compiled from the newspapers of the period, has an entry for 27 February 1931. “In the morning Allahabad people were alarmed at the sound of shots in Alfred Park,” it says. There was “a regular fusillade of bullets between the C. I. D. and some criminal suspects whom the police had been tracking.” One tree sheltered a special superintendent of police and another a suspect, about 50 yards apart, and the shooting lasted nearly half an hour.

Police got a supply of ammunition, the entry says, while the suspects ran out, and one of them fell dead. Said to be Azad, he was “wanted for some alleged political offences.” A last sentence follows. “Another story was that the deceased finding his ammunition exhausted committed suicide.”

Chandrashekhar Azad was 24 by the usual birth date, and the police of the United Provinces had wanted him since the Kakori arrests of September 1925. What follows leans on Jawaharlal Nehru’s autobiography and on three Hindi books by men who knew him: Manmathnath Gupta’s 1948 history of the revolutionary movement, Yashpal’s memoir Simhavalokan and Vishwanath Vaishampayan’s biography. In 1931 Gupta was in prison, Vaishampayan had been arrested just over two weeks before the park, and Yashpal was in Allahabad that morning but not in it. Hindi passages are translated by tuput. For the Assembly bomb and the trial, see the piece on Bhagat Singh’s hanging. This one follows the man who commanded the army Bhagat Singh belonged to.

A village in Alirajpur

Chandrashekhar Tiwari was born at Bhavra, a village in the princely state of Alirajpur in what is now Madhya Pradesh, to Sitaram Tiwari and Jagrani Devi. His usual birth date, 23 July 1906, is a reconstruction. Vaishampayan prints a note by a Jhansi comrade, Bhagwan Das Mahor, who took down the mother’s own account: a Monday, the second day of the bright half of the month of Sawan, at two in the afternoon. Having forgotten the year, she left Mahor to work out 23 July 1906 from old almanacs.

Newspapers sometimes place the birth at Badarka in Unnao district, the family’s older village. Against that, Vaishampayan notes that Sitaram Tiwari left Badarka in the famine of Samvat 1956 (1899 to 1900) and settled at Bhavra, and that a Badarka birth would have made Azad 22 to 24 in 1921, when the caning sentence and a photograph of the time show a boy of 14 or 15. District officials at Alirajpur give Bhavra and call the hut where he spent his childhood the town’s main attraction.

Fifteen strokes in Banaras

At the height of Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation movement in 1921, he was arrested in Banaras. New India Samachar says the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh had shaken the young Chandrashekhar. Picketing the Sanskrit College, Vaishampayan says, he was tried before a magistrate he names as Khareghat. Students arrested with him got rigorous imprisonment, but at 15 he was ordered fifteen strokes of the cane.

Asked his name in court, the boy said Azad, meaning free. Gupta in 1948 and Vaishampayan give the rest the same way: father’s name Swadhin (independent), address Jailkhana (prison). A 2022 New India Samachar feature and the 1988 India Post stamp brochure have the father as Swatantra, which also means independent, and the address as “Jail” or “Prison.” Giving false names in court had become a habit of the movement, Vaishampayan adds. No court record of the exchange turned up in anything consulted for this piece.

Nehru set the flogging down in his autobiography, published in 1936, in a passage on how jails punished political prisoners “severely” for any “breach of gaol discipline.” “For such a breach a young boy of fifteen or sixteen, who called himself Azad, was ordered to be flogged,” he wrote. “He was stripped and tied to the whipping triangle, and as each stripe fell on him and cut into his flesh, he shouted ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai’. Every stripe brought forth the slogan” until the boy fainted. A jail punishment in Nehru’s telling is a court sentence carried out at the Central Jail in Vaishampayan’s, and Vaishampayan says he heard the story from Azad and saw the scars. Officers urged the boy to apologise and he refused.

Kakori and the arrests he missed

New India Samachar records that the Hindustan Republican Association was formed in Kanpur in October 1924. Ten of its men stopped the 8 Down train near Kakori outside Lucknow on 9 August 1925 and took the railway’s cash bags, according to Gupta, who was one of the ten. He wrote that three of them (Rajendra Lahiri, Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqulla Khan) were hanged and one turned approver, a captured man who informs for a pardon.

Arrests began on 26 September 1925, Vaishampayan writes, with warrants out for Azad too. Azad, Ashfaqulla, Sachindranath Bakshi and Kundan Lal were not caught in the first sweep. Four men in all went to the gallows, Ashfaqulla after his later capture, Lahiri on 17 December 1927 at Gonda jail and the others two days later. Azad and Kundan Lal “eluded the police,” in the words of New India Samachar.

After Kakori, Gupta writes, Azad was the foremost commander in North India. Revolutionaries from across India met in 1928, he says, and chose a seven-man central committee that included Bhagat Singh and Azad, with Azad head of the army section. Harshvardhan Tripathy, writing in Janata Weekly, places the meeting at Firoz Shah Kotla in Delhi, over 8 and 9 September, and says Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev proposed the new name with “Socialism” in it. Out of it came the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association and its armed wing, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army.

Lahore, 17 December 1928

Four men were chosen to kill the police officer held responsible for the beating of Lala Lajpat Rai, Gupta writes: Azad, Shivaram Rajguru, Bhagat Singh and Jaigopal. Jaigopal had been watching a Mr. Scott. On 17 December 1928 J. P. Saunders came out of the office in Lahore instead, with Chanan Singh beside him. Rajguru fired first and Bhagat Singh fired again. A head constable, Chanan Singh, and an officer named Fearn gave chase. Fearn stopped when Bhagat Singh shot at him. Chanan Singh kept after Bhagat Singh and Rajguru as they ran for a small door into the DAV College compound. “Until now Azad had been silent,” Gupta writes. Azad shot him with his pistol, and he died within the hour.

The Indian Quarterly Register’s chronicle for December 1928 gave the shooting one line. Saunders, “a European Police officer,” was “shot dead at Lahore while leaving his office,” and the motive was “attributed to be political.” On the night of 18 December the HSRA pasted a notice on Lahore’s walls, and a copy in Bhagat Singh’s handwriting was later produced in court in the Lahore Conspiracy Case. “Lala Lajpat Rai is avenged,” it said, and “let the world know that India still lives.” It was signed “Balraj.”

Balraj, Yashpal writes, was an invented name Azad used to sign the party’s manifestos. It closes the leaflet that Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw into the Central Legislative Assembly on 8 April 1929, under the rank “Commander-in-Chief,” and the Marxists Internet Archive’s transcriber identifies Balraj as Azad. Azad and two others were first meant to wait outside and rescue the two men after the bomb, Gupta says, but Bhagat Singh refused, because he wanted to be arrested. Yashpal’s manifesto after Azad’s death carried his own name, because approvers’ statements had by then told the police who the commander-in-chief was.

A brahmachari by the Satar river

A hut by a Hanuman shrine on the bank of the Satar river at Dhimarpura village near Orchha was where Azad lived as a brahmachari, a celibate religious student, according to Vaishampayan, a Jhansi member of the party who was with Azad from the police round-ups that followed the Saunders killing and the Assembly bomb until 10 February 1931. The Press Information Bureau says he spent his long spells underground mostly near Jhansi, Rani Lakshmibai’s town, teaching the children of poor families in nearby villages.

The police were taking the party apart through its own members. Kailashpati, arrested in Delhi at the end of October 1930, turned approver within three or four days, Yashpal writes, and Azad took it hard. By early 1931, says Vaishampayan, Azad slept badly, woke him at night to talk about his life and said the building of the party would now collapse. They parted on 10 February. Next evening Vaishampayan was arrested in Kanpur’s Coolie Bazaar, which he puts down to treachery by his own comrades.

The bomb under the Viceroy’s train

On 23 December 1929, bombs buried under the track near Delhi went off as the Viceroy’s special train passed, and Lord Irwin escaped. The charge fired a few seconds late, Gupta says, and the largest hand in it was said to be Yashpal’s. Yashpal writes that the case over the explosion was pending against him. Congress, meeting at Lahore, passed a resolution condemning the attempt, and Gandhi condemned it again in an article, “The Cult of the Bomb.”

The HSRA answered in January 1930 with The Philosophy of the Bomb. According to a note on the shahidbhagatsingh.org text, Bhagwati Charan Vohra wrote it in consultation with Azad, in a room above the Soloman Company in Aminabad, Lucknow, that Azad, Vohra and Yashpal used as a hideout. The pamphlet charges the Congress with having “declared war against the revolutionaries” when it might have been expected to declare it on the British government. Its closing section opens with “no crime that Britain has not committed in India” and calls for a “war to the end” for “Victory or Death.”

Azad at Anand Bhawan

Azad went to see Nehru at Anand Bhawan, the Nehru family house in Allahabad, in his last weeks. “A stranger came to see me at our house, and I was told that he was Chandrashekhar Azad,” Nehru wrote. It was soon after Nehru’s release from jail, “either a little before father’s death or a few days after,” and Nehru had heard of Azad ten years earlier as the boy “flogged in prison for some breach of gaol discipline.”

Hopes of talks between the Government and the Congress, raised by the release of Congress leaders, had brought him, Nehru says. He wanted to know whether, after a settlement, his group would “still be considered, and treated, as outlaws; hunted out from place to place, with a price on their heads, and the prospect of the gallows ever before them.” Azad said he and many of his associates were convinced “that purely terrorist methods were futile,” although he did not believe freedom would come by peaceful means alone. Nehru had no answer to what Azad was to do now. Of the old terrorists and their new associates he wrote: “Many of them, it seems to me, have definitely the fascist mentality.”

Yashpal’s memoir gives another version. In it Azad went to talk about the hopes and fears of a settlement through the Round Table Conference, a few days after Motilal Nehru’s death, and came back to the rented house in Allahabad’s Katra quarter with his lips quivering, saying that Nehru had called them fascists. Azad also asked Nehru to press Gandhi to put the release of Bhagat Singh and the other Lahore case prisoners into the settlement, Yashpal adds, and Nehru said Gandhi would not. Nehru’s passage on Azad does not mention the request. He wrote under British rule and could not write everything, Yashpal argues.

Nehru gives the timing of Azad’s death. “Two or three weeks later, while the Gandhi-Irwin talks were going on, I heard at Delhi that Chandrashekhar Azad had been shot down and killed by the police in Allahabad.” Gandhi and Irwin’s agreement was issued on 5 March 1931, six days after the fight.

Who told the police

Gupta’s account of 27 February begins at about ten in the morning, with Azad and a comrade, Sukhdev Raj (not the Sukhdev hanged with Bhagat Singh), walking from the Chowk towards Katra. Seeing Virbhadra Tiwari, Azad stopped short. Tiwari, Gupta writes, had been arrested in the Kakori case and released “for some mysterious reasons”; some in the party suspected him, and it was said he kept in with both the police and the party. Azad thought Tiwari had not seen him. According to Gupta he had. Azad and Sukhdev Raj sat down in Alfred Park. Two men walked by, Inspector Vishweshwar Singh and a man called Dalchand, who knew Azad by sight. Dalchand went back and told Nott-Bower, the superintendent of the CID, who drove to the park.

Yashpal tells it differently. Sukhdev Raj told him in 1938 that Azad pointed at the road and said it looked like Tiwari going by, and asked if he had seen them. Azad only guessed, Yashpal notes, and he doubts that Tiwari was the informer. From where Azad sat, the park road was 200 to 250 paces off, and Vishweshwar Singh’s mother later told a comrade, Surendra Pande, about a different young man, fair and curly-haired, who whispered with the inspector and brought him news that very morning.

Yashpal’s defence of Tiwari comes from a man who had joined the plan to kill him. That winter, by his own account, he agreed to help Azad shoot Tiwari at night near the Memorial Well in Allahabad, and the two waited at the spot three times without Tiwari appearing. In jail he later came to see the attempt as excessive, since he found no proof Tiwari had ever had anyone arrested. The Press Information Bureau says only that Azad “was betrayed by some of his colleagues.” The India Post brochure says “an associate.”

Who fired the last shot

Nehru’s account, published in 1936, has the police killing him. Azad “tried to defend himself from behind a tree; there was quite a shooting-match, and he injured one or two policemen before he was shot down.” Hollins, then Inspector General of Police in the United Provinces, wrote in an English magazine in October 1954, according to Yashpal, that Azad’s first bullet hit Nott-Bower’s arm and that the police shot him. Nott-Bower’s bullet hit Azad’s thigh and Azad’s hit Nott-Bower’s wrist, so that the pistol fell, Gupta says. The police were afraid to go near the body, Gupta writes, and fired a bullet into the leg to make sure. He does not mention a shot to the head.

People who were present told Yashpal that one of the two men fought on, wounded, and fired the last bullet at his own temple, and that police fired several bullets into the body before they came close. The police stalled over releasing the body until a man was put forward as Azad’s brother. It had a wound on the right temple with the hair around it burnt, which Yashpal reads as a shot from a pistol pressed to the head. Cremation was on the bank of the Ganga. Strict orders had been given against a procession, but a large crowd gathered and took away the ashes a pinch at a time.

Azad used to say, Yashpal records: “I will not do a performing monkey’s dance in court, hands tied, after I am arrested. There are eight bullets in the pistol and a second magazine of eight. Fifteen I will fire at the enemy, and the sixteenth here.” As he said it he would touch the barrel of the pistol to his temple. Adopting that version, the 1988 India Post brochure says: “Left with only one bullet, he chose to end his life at his own hands rather than surrender to the police.” The same brochure dates both Kakori and the attempt on the Viceroy’s train to 1926, which were 1925 and 1929. No inquest or post-mortem report turned up in any of the books or archives consulted for this piece.

The tree, the pistol and the park

Yashpal writes that people began to worship the tree in Alfred Park from the day after the fight. Pellets and bullets had lodged in its trunk, and devotees smeared it with vermilion and lit lamps and incense. After a few days, with the crowds growing, the government had it cut down. Gupta, writing in 1948, says the same, that the British had the tree cut down and the spot erased. From then on, Yashpal adds, townspeople called the place Azad Park.

Alfred Park began in 1870 as a welcome ground for Prince Alfred, the Ministry of Tourism’s Incredible India site says, and is now the 133-acre Chandra Shekhar Azad Park. Azad’s Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless pistol, a .32 he called Bamtul Bukhara according to the Madras Courier, is displayed at the entrance of the Allahabad Museum, inside the park where he fought.