The first Christmas Day plot was a conspiracy made by the Indian revolutionary movement in 1909 : during the year-ending holidays, the Governor of Bengal organized at his residence a ball in the presence of the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and all the high-ranking officers and officials of the Capital (Calcutta). The 10th Jat Regiment was in charge of the security. Indoctrinated by Jatindranath Mukherjee, its soldiers decided to blow up the ballroom and take advantage of destroying the colonial Government. In keeping with his predecessor Otto (William Oskarovich) von Klemm, a friend of Lokamanya Tilak, on 6 February 1910, M. Arsenyev, the Russian Consul-General, wrote to St Petersburg that it had been intended to "arouse in the country a general perturbation of minds and, thereby, afford the revolutionaries an opportunity to take the power in their hands." According to R.C. Majumdar, "The police had suspected nothing and it is hard to say what the outcome would have been had the soldiers not been betrayed by one of their comrades who informed the authoritiesabout the impending coup.".
The second Christmas Day plot was to initiate an insurrection in Bengal in British India during World War I with German arms and support. Scheduled for Christmas Day, 1915, the plan was conceived and led by the Jugantar group under the Bengali Indian revolutionary Jatindranath Mukherjee, to be coordinated with simultaneous uprising in the British colony of Burma and Kingdom of Siam under direction of the Ghadar Party, along with a German raid on the South Indian city of Madras and the British penal colony in Andaman Islands. The aim of the plot was to seize the Fort William, isolate Bengal and capture the capital city of Calcutta, which was then to be used as a staging ground for a pan-Indian revolution. The Christmas Day plot was one of the later plans for pan-Indian mutiny during the war that were coordinated between the Indian revolutionary underground, the Indian independence committee in Berlin, the Ghadar Party in North America, and the German Foreign office. The plot was ultimately thwarted after British intelligence uncovered the plot through German and Indian double agents in Europe and South-East Asia.
Read more about Christmas Day Plot: Background, Pre-war Developments, World War I, Christmas Day Plot, Culmination
Famous quotes containing the words christmas day, christmas, day and/or plot:
“I heard the bells, on Christmas Day,
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
“The twelfth day of Christmas,
My true love sent to me
Twelve lords a-leaping.”
—Unknown. The Twelve Days of Christmas (l. 89–91)
“No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sitting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.”
—Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)