India Marked 100 Years of the Kakori Train Action on 9 August 2025 With a Year of Programmes, a Memorial Ceremony and a Prime Minister's Tribute

The Kakori Train Action, the raid on the 8 Down passenger train near Lucknow on 9 August 1925, turned 100 on 9 August 2025, and the Prime Minister’s Office issued a tribute that afternoon. The Uttar Pradesh government had opened a year-long centenary festival on 9 August 2024, and it had already changed the event’s official name in 2021.

This piece follows how the raid has been remembered, from a Congress resolution in December 1927 to a ceremony at the memorial in August 2026. The raid, the arrests and the trial are told in full in the earlier article on the Kakori Train Action, and the party’s chief in the United Provinces, according to the 1927 judgment, has his own piece in Ram Prasad Bismil. The generation before is in Khudiram Bose and the one after in Bhagat Singh.

The raid and the party, as the record states them

The Indian Annual Register for 1927, a Calcutta yearbook of public affairs, summarises the case in a few lines. A passenger train was stopped and looted on 9 August 1925 within ten miles of Lucknow Junction, and the inquiry that followed turned up what the judge called a widespread revolutionary organisation in the United Provinces, linked to a headquarters in Bengal.

PTI’s report of 9 August 2025, which draws on the Ministry of Culture’s Indian Culture portal, says the Hindustan Republican Association was founded in 1924 by Sachindranath Sanyal, Jogeshchandra Chatterjee and Bismil. It names Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, Thakur Roshan Singh and Rajendranath Lahiri as the four who were hanged, and says the party took British treasury money from the guard’s cabin of the No. 8 Down. The Press Information Bureau’s New India Samachar adds that Lahiri stopped the train by pulling the chain in a second-class compartment.

One detail differs between the government account and the court. The New India Samachar lists Roshan Singh among the men who looted the train. The judgment, as the Register prints it, found him guilty of the conspiracy and of the Bamrauli robbery of 25 December 1924, and does not name him in the train robbery.

The party’s politics were on paper. A leaflet called The Revolutionary, held in an online archive of historical constitutions and dated there to 1925, says the party’s object was “to establish a federal Republic of United State of India” by “an organized and armed revolution”. It states that independence “can never be achieved through peaceful and constitutional means”, and that the party would “enter into a desperate campaign of terrorism” when circumstances called for it. The text gives no date, and it is signed “Vijay Kumar”, as President of the Central Council of the “Republic Party of India”.

What the 1927 judgment says

Special Judge A. H. De B. Hamilton delivered the judgment at Lucknow on 6 April 1927. The Register records 22 accused before the court, more than 250 prosecution witnesses and exhibits numbering nearly 1,100. Three men were sentenced to be hanged and one was transported for life. The rest received prison terms of five to fourteen years, two were acquitted, and two who had turned approvers, meaning they gave evidence for the Crown, were pardoned.

The three sentenced to death were Bismil, Lahiri and Roshan Singh. The Register’s summary calls Bismil, then 28 and from Shahjahanpur, the most important member of the conspiracy in the United Provinces, and calls Lahiri, 24 and from Benares, a leading member who had acted as the link with Bengal.

On motive, Hamilton said he believed “the great majority of the accused did join this conspiracy for no personal gain or advantage”. On the train itself he said it was improbable that Ahmad Ali, a passenger who was shot, was deliberately aimed at, though he found that the shooting along the sides of the train showed a disregard of human life.

The hangings came in December 1927. The New India Samachar says Lahiri was hanged at Gonda district jail on 17 December, two days before the scheduled date, because of public outrage and fear of a jailbreak. PTI’s 2025 report gives 19 December for all four, which leaves Lahiri’s date at odds with the Press Information Bureau’s. The Tribune and PTI, reporting in 2021, give 19 December for Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan and Roshan Singh, and PTI places Ashfaqullah’s hanging at Faizabad district jail.

The Congress sessions of December 1927

The Register also prints the proceedings of the Indian National Congress at Madras that month. Its second resolution, one of five passed unanimously from the chair without debate, recorded the Congress’s pain at the government’s refusal to commute the Kakori sentences. It named Ramaprosad Biswas (the Register’s spelling of Ram Prasad Bismil), Rajendra Nath Lahiri, Asfaqullah and Rohan Singh, and offered sympathy to their families.

The All-India Republican Congress, which met in Madras on 29 December 1927, went further. Its resolution described the hangings of the “young patriots of Kakori case” as “judicial murder”.

From “conspiracy” to “action” in 2021

The court called the raid the train dacoity, meaning armed robbery, and the case was the Kakori Conspiracy Case. Both terms carried into later usage. On 9 August 2021, PTI reported, the Uttar Pradesh government began calling the event the Kakori Train Action in all official communications, replacing the usual Kakori train robbery or Kakori train conspiracy. An unnamed official told PTI that the word “kand” was derogatory for an act of the freedom movement and had been replaced with “action”.

The programme that day was at the Kakori Shaheed Smarak on the outskirts of Lucknow. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Governor Anandiben Patel attended, families of freedom fighters were honoured and an art exhibition was held. Governor Patel said events like the Kakori Train Action should be taught in schools.

At the August 2026 programme the Chief Minister said the British administration had called the incident a dacoity and that it was unfortunate the word had continued after Independence, the Free Press Journal reported.

The Amrit Mahotsav years

On 31 July 2022, in the 91st episode of Mann Ki Baat, the Prime Minister described Kakori railway station near Lucknow as one of the stations linked with the freedom movement and said the names of Bismil and Ashfaqullah Khan are associated with it. He was speaking of an effort called Azadi Ki Railgadi Aur Railway Station, meant to show the role of Indian Railways in the freedom struggle, as part of the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav, the programme marking 75 years of independence.

The Ministry of Tourism’s Utsav portal lists a “Kakori Sacrifice Day” programme at the Residency in Lucknow’s Kaiserbagh on 19 and 20 December 2022. The portal places it within the Amrit Mahotsav series and the Chauri-Chaura Centenary Festival, the programme around Chauri Chaura. The listing names the Rashtradhun played by a police band, wreaths on pictures of the Kakori martyrs, a light and sound show, a photograph display on a 75-metre canvas, Vande Mataram sung by 75 artists and a drone show.

The centenary year, August 2024 to August 2025

Adityanath opened the Kakori Train Action centenary festival in Lucknow on 9 August 2024 and said it would run for the whole year, All India Radio reported. The programme included a special train, the Kakori Shaurya Gatha Express, to run across the state with Indian Railways for two months, along with a special postage stamp, motorcycle rallies, a six-day commemoration fair, honours for martyrs’ families, exhibitions on the freedom struggle and the planting of 100 plants for each martyr. The state also aimed to hoist tricolours across Uttar Pradesh from 13 to 15 August, with a target of nearly 4.50 crore (45 million) flags.

On 27 February 2025, Governor Patel opened a freedom-struggle gallery called Swatantrata Sangram Vithika at the Philatelic Museum inside the Lucknow General Post Office. PTI reported that it displays stamps honouring the Kakori incident and a mural of the raid, and that the GPO’s delivery hall was the site of the trial nearly a century ago.

On 13 July 2025 Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, who is the Lok Sabha member for Lucknow, released a postage stamp and unveiled a statue of Chandra Bhanu Gupta at National PG College in Lucknow. PTI’s report did not give the stamp’s details. Singh said the centenary would be marked in a grand manner in Lucknow, and PTI’s background note records that Gupta and Govind Ballabh Pant defended the accused at the trial.

The closing ceremony was held in Lucknow on 8 August 2025, according to IANS. The Chief Minister laid a wreath at the martyrs’ statue, planted a peepal tree, released a book on the Kakori incident and watched a Culture Department performance that included a dramatised account of the action. He announced that Malihabad mangoes from Lucknow would be branded “Kakori” and exported.

9 August 2025

The Prime Minister’s message, posted on X and reproduced by the Press Information Bureau at 2:59 pm, said the courage shown by patriotic Indians at Kakori a hundred years earlier showed the resentment people felt towards colonial rule, and that they were angry at how people’s money was used for colonial exploitation. It ended: “Their valour will always be remembered by the people of India.”

Union Home Minister Amit Shah wrote that the Kakori Train Action was a symbol of courage, sacrifice and patriotism in the freedom struggle, and named Bismil, Chandrashekhar Azad and Ashfaqullah Khan, All India Radio reported. The Chief Minister also posted a tribute. Prasar Bharati’s chairman, Navneet Sehgal, opened an exhibition of rare newspapers called Dastawej at the Kokoro Art Gallery in Lucknow, which ran until 12 August and carried photographs of Bismil, Lahiri, Roshan Singh and Ashfaqullah Khan.

The memorial at Kakori and the families

The Kakori Shaheed Smarak stands close to the railway milestone numbered 1085/4-7, about a kilometre from Kakori station. A 2016 report in Lucknow Pulse says it was built in honour of the martyrs on 19 December 1983 by Indira Gandhi. At that point it held a statue of the martyrs, and the Lucknow Tourism Promotion Parishad had sanctioned Rs 50 lakh for renovation. The district magistrate had sent a Rs 4.5 crore proposal to the state tourism department, and Governor Ram Naik pledged efforts to give the action more national and historic importance. The report does not say whether the work was finished.

On 9 August 2026, the 101st anniversary, the state held a programme at the Smarak. It included a musical play by the Bharatendu Natya Akademi, the release of booklets on the Kakori martyrs and on children’s paintings of Vande Mataram, and an expansion of the Amar Shaheed Vatika memorial garden, where 34 saplings were planted. The Free Press Journal listed family members present, among them Meeta Bakshi, granddaughter of Sachindra Nath Bakshi; two great-grandsons of Thakur Roshan Singh; and Afaq Ullah Khan of Ashfaqullah Khan’s family.

Afaqullah Khan told PTI in 2025 that he is the grandson of Ashfaqullah’s elder brother, Riyasatullah Khan. Ashfaqullah’s will asked that a child in the family be named after him. His father was named Ishtiaqullah instead, because the family felt the name would revive painful memories, and the first child of Ishtiaqullah’s marriage, Afaqullah’s elder brother, was named Ashfaqullah Khan.