Sohan Singh Bhakna
Founding president of the Ghadar Party in America in 1913. Sentenced to death after the failed rising, he spent sixteen years in prison.
Sohan Singh was born in 1870 at Bhakna near Amritsar, a farmer's son, and emigrated to America in 1909, where he worked in a lumber mill in Oregon.
In 1913 he became founding president of the Hindustan Ghadar Party, founded at Astoria and later based in San Francisco, which called for armed revolution against British rule. He returned to India in 1914, was arrested on landing, and in the Lahore Conspiracy Case was sentenced to death, commuted to life. He spent sixteen years in jail, much of it in the Andaman Islands, and went on hunger strikes for political prisoners.
After his release he became a leader of the Kirti Kisan Party and the communist movement, and was jailed again. He died in 1968 at ninety-eight.
