As part of Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Friday visited Cellular Jail in Port Blair and paid tributes to freedom fighters.
Shah also visited the cell of Sachin Sanyal and garlanded his portrait. "It was an emotional moment for a person like me. Perhaps he was the only one among all these freedom fighters who was sent twice to 'Kala Paani'", the Home Minister said.
Who is Sachin Sanyal?
Originally hailing from Bengal, Sachindra Nath Sanyal was born in then North-Western Province in the city of Benaras in 1893. Right from an early age, Sanyal was known for his maverick views and revolutionary ideas. At the age of 20, he opened a branch of Anushilan Samiti in Patna. Anushilan Samiti was a Bengali Indian organisation that existed in the first quarter of the twentieth century and expounded revolutionary violence as the means to end the British Raj in India.
Sachindra Nath Sanyal played a pivotal role during the Gadar party conspiracy. It was an anti-British mutiny modelled on the great uprising of 1857. The plot started taking shape at the onset of the First World War, between the Ghadar Party in the United States, the Berlin Committee in Germany, the Indian revolutionaries underground in British India.
Large scale arms and ammunition were expected to smuggled into India to initiate a pan-India anti-British uprising. However, due to coordinated intelligence input and spy network, the Britishers got wind of the movement and they repressed the movement in February 1915.
Central figures were arrested, revolts in smaller units and agitated armed groups within India were also crushed. Sanyal went underground to escape British action and to continue the freedom struggle.
Sanyal, however, was caught and sentenced to jail in the Cellular prison in Andaman & Nicobar Island. There he wrote his famous book titled Bandi Jeevan (A Life of Captivity, 1922).
Following the end of Non-Cooperation movement, Sanyal, Ram Prasad Bismil and other revolutionaries founded the Hindustan Republican Association in October 1924. He was the author of the HRA manifesto, titled The Revolutionary, that was circulated in North Indian cities on 31 December 1924.
Sanyal was once again incarcerated in 1925 and sent to the Cellular prison in the Andamans for being allegedly involved in Kakori conspiracy. His ancestral home in Varanasi was seized by the British authorities. Sachindra Nath Sanyal died while serving his second term in cell prison on February 7, 1942.
