24th January is a date which every nationalist must and should remember with the utmost respect. On this date in our undivided India was born a revolutionary nationalist leader [however owing to the worthless historians of NCERT, the name of this Bengal tiger is almost forgotten from memories of a citizen]. His name was PULIN BIHARI DAS, who was the founder of DHAKA ANUSHILAN SAMITY[an extension of Anushilan Samity of Kolkata, the main motto of this organisation was to train the youth about nationalism and fight the mighty British colonial rule].
Pulin Bihari was lucky to have nationalist teachers like Bipin Chandra Pal and Barrister Pramathanath Mitra[founder of Anushilan Samity], who imbibed in him the unputdownable spirit of nationalism. Pulin Bihari was an organizer par excellence and the Samiti soon had over 500 branches in Eastern parts of Bengal. Pulin Bihari founded the National School in Dhaka. It was basically built as a training ground for raising a revolutionary force.
In the beginning, the students were trained with lathis and wooden swords. Afterwards, they were groomed with daggers and finally with pistols and revolvers. Pulin Bihari masterminded the plot to eliminate Basil Copleston Allen, the tyrannical District Magistrate of Dhaka. On 23 December 1907, when Mr Allen was on his way back to England, he was shot through his body at the Goalundo railway station but he narrowly escaped with his life. A few days after the incident a gang of around 400 Muslim rioters attacked Pulin at his residence chanting anti-Hindu slogans.[Probably the beginning of jihadi politics in Bengal] He staved off the rioters bravely with barely a handful of his associates. In July 1910, Pulin Bihari Das was arrested along with 46 other of his trained revolutionaries on charges of sedition.
Later another 44of his student revolutionaries prominent names of some: Bhupesh Chandra Nag, Shyam Sundar Chakravarti, Krishna Kumar Mitra, Subodh Mallick and Ashwini Dutta[most of these names the present government of India both at the state and Central probably don’t care about]arrested. This came to be known as the Dhaka Conspiracy Case. The secret files of intelligence of British Government of those times addressed Pulin Bihari Das as a formidable threat to British Empire of India along with Baghajatin, Sashibhusan Raychaudhuri[alias Sashida] and Rashbehari Bose[after his attack on Lord Hardinge]After the trail Pulin was awarded lifelong imprisonment. He was transferred to the Cellular Jail where he found himself in the company of revolutionaries like Hem Chandra Das, Barindra Kumar Ghosh[brother of Aurobindo Ghosh] and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
In 1918 Pulin Bihari was released from a British prison, but on house detention for 1 year. When he was totally released, he once again tried to revive the activities of the Samiti. The organization had been banned and its members were scattered here and there, and there was only a lukewarm response. At the Nagpur Congress and later at Kolkata, the majority of the surviving revolutionaries accepted in principle the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi and decided to support the Non-Cooperation Movement. However, Pulin Bihari remained steadfast and declined to comprise with ideals and refused to accept the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi. As the Samiti was then a banned outfit, he founded the Bharat Sevak Sangh in 1920 to carry on the revolutionary activities.
Under the patronage of barrister S.R.Das, he publishes two periodicals Hak Katha and Swaraj through which he began to spread the revolutionary ideas. He began to criticize the Congress policy of non-violence. The Samiti continued to exist in secrecy, however, his differences with the Samiti began to surface. He severed all his links with the Samiti, dissolved Bharat Sevak Sangha and retired from active politics in 1922. In 1928, he founded the Bangiya Byayam Samiti, at Mechhuabazar in Kolkata. It was an institute of physical culture and effectively an Akhada where he began to train young men in stick-wielding, swordplay and wrestling[following the ideal of Swami Vivekananda]. The University of Calcutta has a Special Endowment Medal named after him, called the Pulin Bihari Das Smriti Padak.This great iconic figure of #Nationalism and face of armed struggle against the colonial British rule were born on 24th January 1877the village of Lonesingh, in the district of Shariatpur.Let all of my nationalist friends pay our #Respect to this great revolutionary on his Birth Anniversary.
(Source: Forgotten Heroes of Indian Freedom Struggle)
