Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna Ji, first president of the Ghadar Party, came from Bhakna Kalan in Amritsar district. The village still marks his birth anniversary.
About 8,000 Ghadarites returned to Punjab by early 1915. The Lahore Conspiracy Cases, nine trials in all, convicted 291 men: 42 were executed, 114 transported for life and 93 given varying terms of imprisonment, and 42 of the accused were acquitted. The first case alone was brought against 152. Seven were hanged on 16 November 1915, including Shaheed Kartar Singh Sarabha Ji of Sarabha village in Ludhiana district, whose ancestral home is now a museum, and Vishnu Ganesh Pingle.
Desh Bhagat Yadgar Hall in Jalandhar is the movement's own memorial, library and archive. It hosts the annual Mela Gadri Babeyan Da, whose 34th edition began on 30 October 2025.
He was a landholding farmer who went to the American west coast in 1909 and worked in the Oregon lumber mills. He came into the movement through the work, the wage and the exclusion rather than through politics, which is true of nearly all of them. Ghadar's leadership was not students.
Of the forty-two men sentenced to death in that case, seven were hanged at Lahore Central Jail in November 1915 and the rest had the sentence commuted to transportation. The list of the condemned is weighted heavily toward the Doaba and the Majha, toward villages that had already been sending men abroad for a generation.
He served sixteen years, much of it in the Andamans, was released in 1930, went into the Kirti Kisan movement and the peasant organisations, and was jailed again under the independent government. He died in 1968 at ninety eight, so the first president of the Ghadar Party lived to watch the Green Revolution start in his own district.
The Tribune, on Shaheed Kartar Singh Sarabha Ji.
PTC News, on the Bhakna birth anniversary.
News on AIR, on the 34th Mela Gadri Babeyan Da.