Ten Young Men Stopped a Train Near Lucknow in 1925. The Raj Charged 26 Men With Conspiring to Wage War on the King and Hanged Four.

At dusk on 9 August 1925, a hammer was ringing on an iron safe beside a stopped passenger train in open country short of Lucknow. Chisels had made little impression on the steel, so Ashfaqulla Khan, the strongest man among the raiders, handed his pistol to a comrade and took over the sledge. Then the sound of another train came out of the dark, and a headlight swelled down the line.

Manmathnath Gupta, one of the ten men, described the next minute in his memoir They Lived Dangerously, published in 1956. They feared a military train. Ram Prasad Bismil, the leader, noticed that the track was double and remembered that the Punjab Mail was due, and he told everyone to hide their weapons and stand about like sightseers. Ashfaqulla put the hammer down. Within seconds the Mail had gone past in a roar of light, and he picked the hammer up again until the safe had a hole big enough to pull the bags through.

A Calcutta digest of public affairs, the Indian Quarterly Register, would later call what followed “one of the biggest conspiracy cases in India”. What the party did after 1927 is told in the piece on Bhagat Singh. This one stays with the train, the arrests, the court and the gallows.

Money and a manifesto

Bismil gave the reason himself. He wrote his autobiography in the condemned cell at Gorakhpur jail while waiting to be hanged, and it is the fullest account the party left. By his telling, the non-cooperation movement had gone slack, and the young men he had counted on turned up broke and discouraged. District organisers got small monthly sums from the party, and when its backers drew back he borrowed to give them a month’s expenses. Nobody gave donations and nobody lent. A supplier of new foreign-made arms would sell on credit, but the party had nothing to pay with.

So the party decided on a robbery. Private property was off limits, Bismil wrote, and he asked why government money should not be taken instead. On a railway trip he had noticed an iron box in the guard’s van, and at Lucknow station he watched porters carry such boxes off a train with no chain or lock on them. Between Saharanpur and Lucknow, by his reckoning, the takings came to about ten thousand rupees.

Gupta supplies the argument inside the party. After informers wrecked several village robberies, he says, the party had given up that kind of raid, and Ashfaqulla alone argued against touching railway money, because it would bring the whole government down on them. Only after the younger men, who wanted to kill any English driver or guard as revenge for the ill treatment of a comrade, gave their word of honour that nobody would be killed on purpose did Bismil agree to lead.

Its politics were already on paper. A leaflet called The Revolutionary said that “the immediate object of the revolutionary party in the domain of politics is to establish a federal Republic of United State of India by an organized and armed revolution.” It added: “This independence can never be achieved through peaceful and constitutional means.” Sachindranath Sanyal, whom the trial judge later named as the main source of the party’s ideas, had already been given two years for distributing it at Bankura, Bismil wrote. Drishti IAS dates the formation of the Hindustan Republican Association, the name the party is known by, to October 1924.

Ten men on the 8 Down

Ten minutes sank the first plan. The day before, Gupta writes, the ten gathered at Lucknow and walked to a small station meaning to seize the staff and take the day’s cash from a standing train. That train, the 8 Down, which carried the day’s station takings to Lucknow, steamed past just before they arrived.

On 9 August they changed the plan. Ashfaqulla, Rajendranath Lahiri and Sachindranath Bakshi took second-class tickets and were to pull the chain, while the other seven spread through the third-class carriages. Gupta names those seven as Bismil, Chandrashekhar Azad, Mukundilal, Murarilal, Kundanlal, Banwarilal and himself. A different roll appears in his 1972 history of the revolutionary movement, which includes Roshan Singh and Keshab Chakravarty, so the list of the ten is not settled.

Dusk had fallen when the train stopped, and the men from third class climbed down as if curious about the delay. They made the guard lie on his belly. Two men stood guard on each side of the line with Mauser pistols, Gupta writes, and passengers were told in Hindustani that “we were only after government property.” Fourteen passengers had guns or rifles, Bismil says, including two armed British soldiers, and none moved. In the engine the driver lay down, and an Englishman locked himself in a lavatory.

The bags of cash went into a bedsheet. On the way to Lucknow the men took out the money and threw the empty bags into rain-filled ditches, where, Gupta says, they later showed the police which way the raiders had gone. Ten men walked into Lucknow through the Chowk market. At dawn Gupta bought a copy of the Indian Daily Telegraph, which reported that three men, one of them a European, had been murdered, though no European had been killed.

Accounts of the haul differ. A notice board at Kakori, as quoted in a 2024 editorial, gives Rs 4,679, one anna and six pies. Chaman Lal’s essay on Bismil says eight thousand rupees, and Bismil had counted on ten thousand.

The passenger who got down to find his wife

One man did die. According to Bismil, one of his men climbed down from the guard’s van with a Mauser and began firing for the thrill of it, against orders. A passenger had stepped off the train to reach his wife, and Bismil believed this man’s bullet killed him. His own order had been that nobody was to fire unless attacked, and the two men posted to cover the line had been told to fire at five-minute intervals.

Gupta calls the dead man Amjed Ali, says he had come out of his compartment to see whether his newly married bride was safe, and describes him as “killed by the flying bullets” fired to keep passengers in their seats. Later retellings, including GKToday’s, say the shot was fired by Gupta himself.

In court the name was Ahmad Ali, and the judge was careful about intent. At sentencing the judge said that “it is improbable that Ahmad Ali, who was shot, was deliberately aimed at,” and added: “But nevertheless the shooting along the sides of the train showed a disregard of human life.”

26 September 1925

Police action came within weeks. Bismil says Horton, the CID officer put in charge, studied the scene and the railway police reports and guessed that revolutionaries were responsible. Banknotes from the safe turned up at Shahjahanpur, and the headmaster of the government school there copied letters addressed to a pupil, Indubhushan Mitra, and sent them to Horton. On 26 September 1925, Bismil says, Horton had about thirty people arrested across the province.

Rajendranath Lahiri was caught in November in a bomb-making house at Dakshineswar near Calcutta. By the end of 1925 the police had dropped the case against some of those arrested and sent 26 before a special magistrate, Syed Ainuddin, on charges of conspiracy to wage war against the King-Emperor and conspiracy to commit dacoity (armed robbery) with murder. Three men were still on the run: Bakshi, Azad and Ashfaqulla, Bismil says. Two others turned approvers, meaning they gave evidence for the Crown in return for a pardon, and the magistrate sent the remaining 21 to the Sessions Court.

Indian politicians reacted quickly. At the Cawnpore Congress in December 1925, the reception committee’s chairman, Dr Murarilal, spoke, in the Register’s summary of his speech, of “the Kakori trial which had snatched away many of their ardent and sincere workers, many of whom had not been even admitted to bail.” At a conference of political prisoners there on 28 December, Swami Kumaranand said a rumour was going round that the United Provinces government meant to issue an Ordinance on the strength of the Kakori case.

Eighteen months in court

A Special Judge named Hamilton tried the main case in Lucknow. He had the reputation of a hanging judge, Gupta says. Over 250 prosecution witnesses were called and nearly 1,100 exhibits put in, the Quarterly Register records. Open court heard the case for a year and a half, Bismil wrote.

By Gupta’s account the two sides were not evenly matched. Jagat Narain Mulla, the government’s counsel, was hired at Rs 500 a day, while the defence committee could offer Rs 500 a month to its full-time barrister, Choudhury. Govind Ballabh Pant, Mohanlal Saksena, Khaliquzzaman and others also worked on the defence, and Motilal Nehru helped look for counsel.

6 April 1927

On the morning of the verdict the accused sang as they were taken to court. Outside the courtroom, Gupta writes, they turned to the crowd and sang “Sarfaroshi ki tamanna”, and they kept singing as they went in. The ghazal itself is by Bismil Azimabadi, a poet from Patna, according to Rekhta. Ram Prasad Bismil is linked to it because the opening lines are said to have been on his lips at the gallows.

In Gupta’s account Hamilton summarised his findings and then read out the sentences in alphabetical order.

Three men were sentenced to hang: Bismil, Lahiri and Roshan Singh. Sanyal was transported for life and Gupta got fourteen years. Others received prison terms of five, seven or ten years, two men were acquitted, and the two approvers were pardoned. According to the Register, the judge found Bismil guilty of the Bichpuri robbery of March 1925 and the train robbery, and Lahiri guilty of the train robbery. Roshan Singh was found guilty of conspiracy and of the Bamrauli robbery of December 1924, not of the train robbery. Standing next to Lahiri when the sentence was read, Gupta heard him say in Bengali that the world seemed to have changed.

His reasons are on record, and they were not all harsh. He noted that the public prosecutor himself had asked him “to temper justice with mercy in the case of those who are young and who have played but a secondary part in this conspiracy,” and said he believed “the great majority of the accused did join this conspiracy for no personal gain or advantage.” Against that, he found that a man had been killed in each of four robberies the party carried out, and he held every member responsible. “A revolution as realised by the writer of the white leaflet himself means chaos,” he wrote.

His remarks on sentencing included a recommendation that mattered later. If any of the accused had repented, he said, “I recommend that the Government may consider that as I have done in the case of Banwari.” Banwari Lal, one of the ten men on the train, had confessed and received five years.

The appeal that made it worse

Ashfaqulla was tried separately after his arrest in Delhi, where, by Gupta’s account, an acquaintance betrayed him while he was trying to reach Afghanistan on his way to Russia. In the supplementary case he was sentenced to death and Bakshi got transportation for life.

Both cases went to the Chief Court of Oudh together. On appeal the government sought to raise the sentences of six accused, Gupta says, and the court raised five, three of them from ten years to transportation for life. Gupta’s own fourteen years stood only because, in his words, the court said it would have given him the highest punishment but for his tender age. Home Member Crerar told the Assembly on 23 August 1927, according to the Register, that the Kakori case, “which concluded only yesterday, proved the existence of one or more associations of a dangerous character.” Crerar was answering Sir Hari Singh Gour’s motion to amend the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which let the government declare associations unlawful.

Before the Chief Court, Bismil wrote, the judges did not believe his written promise to the Governor to have nothing more to do with the party, and they called him a merciless murderer. A legal argument ran through his appeals as well. If the death sentences rested on responsibility for the robbery, he wrote, the judgment itself named him the leader, so he alone should hang, and nobody could say whose bullet had killed the passenger. Elected members of the United Provinces Council and members of the Assembly and Council of State petitioned for mercy, he wrote, and so did his father, with about 250 signatures of landowners and honorary magistrates. The Assembly petition pointed out that the sessions judge himself had recommended leniency for repentance. The Viceroy rejected them all, and a Privy Council appeal filed through Mohanlal Saksena failed too.

After the verdict the prisoners went on hunger strike for the treatment given to political prisoners, and the Register’s chronicle counts 17 May 1927 as the fortieth day. Gupta says the hangings were fixed twice in October and put off both times, and that the third date, 19 December, held.

17 and 19 December 1927

Bismil opened the closing chapter of his autobiography on 16 December. In the Penguin translation, as the Book Review quotes it, he wrote: “I write these lines on 16 December 1927.” His cell at Gorakhpur, he said, was nine feet by nine, in an open yard with no shade, and he slept three or four hours a night, though he found great joy in it. He would be the first man of the United Provinces to be sacrificed for the revolutionary movement since the rising of 1857, he wrote. The autobiography closes with a couplet naming Bismil, Roshan, Lahiri and Ashfaq and saying that hundreds would be born from their blood.

Lahiri was hanged at Gonda on 17 December, two days before the others. The Press Information Bureau’s New India Samachar says the British feared unrest and a jail break. Gupta calls the reason an undisclosed mystery and passes on his brother Manmohan’s explanation, that outsiders planned to break into Gonda jail and free Lahiri on the night of the 18th and the authorities heard of it. Lahiri’s last words, as New India Samachar quotes them, were “I am not dying, but I am going to be born again in free India.”

On the 19th, Bismil was hanged at Gorakhpur, Ashfaqulla at Faizabad and Roshan Singh at Allahabad. Travelling by train from Lucknow after the sentences, Gupta had shared a compartment with Roshan Singh and remembers him saying “Om, Om” as the train started and the clank of his chains as he walked off the platform at Allahabad with his escort without looking back. News of the hanging reached Gupta in Naini jail, a few miles away, by noon.

The book, the resolution and the stamp

Bismil’s manuscript left the jail in three parts with the help of a sympathetic warder, according to the Book Review. Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, the editor of Pratap in Kanpur, published it in 1928 and the British banned it. It appeared as Kakori ke Shahid, Gupta says, and the first edition sold out in a month.

Bismil’s last message asked for Hindu-Muslim unity. Bhagat Singh translated it into Punjabi for the January 1928 issue of the journal Kirti, according to Chaman Lal, who has translated it into English. In that version Bismil asks: “If a devotee Muslim like Ashfaq could be right hand man of Arya Samajist like Ram Prasad in revolutionary movement, then why other Hindus and Muslims can’t unite forgetting their petty interests?” He added: “Hindu-Muslim unity; that was our last wish and this only can be our memorial.”

The Indian National Congress at Madras in December 1927 put on record, in a resolution passed unanimously without debate, “its sense of deep pain at the callous attitude of the Government in not commuting the brutal sentences passed in the Kakori case.” Meeting there under Jawaharlal Nehru, the All-India Republican Congress said it viewed with indignation “the judicial murder of some of our young patriots of Kakori case.”

India Post issued a stamp on 19 December 1997, seventy years after the hangings, showing Bismil and Ashfaqulla together. In August 2021 the Uttar Pradesh government replaced the name “Kakori Kand” with “Kakori Train Action”, on the ground that “kand” suggests humiliation, according to Drishti IAS. On 9 August 2025, a hundred years to the day after the robbery, the Prime Minister paid tribute to the men of Kakori, All India Radio reported.