Government repression and frustration caused by the failure of the Indian leadership to provide a positive lead to the people ultimately resulted in revolutionary terrorism.
The youth of Bengal found all avenues of peaceful protest and political action blocked and out of desperation they fell back upon individual heroic action and the cult of the bomb. They no longer believed that passive resistance could achieve nationalist aims.
The British must, therefore, be physically expelled. As the Yugantar wrote on 22 April 1906 after the Barisal Conference: “The remedy lies with the people themselves. The 30 crores of people inhabiting India must raise their 60 crores of hands to stop this curse of oppression.
Force must be stopped by force.” But the revolutionary young men did not try to generate a mass revolution. Instead, they decided to copy the methods of the Irish terrorists and the Russian Nihilists, that is, to assassinate unpopular officials.
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A beginning had been made in this direction when, in 1897, the Chapekar brothers assassinated two unpopular British officials at Poona. In 1904, VD. Savarkar had organised the Abhinava Bharat, a secret society of revolutionaries.
After 1905, several newspapers had begun to advocate revolutionary terrorism. The Sandhya and the Yugantar in Bengal and the Kal in Maharashtra were the most prominent among them.
In December 1907 an attempt was made on the life of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and in April 1908 Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki threw a bomb at a carriage which they believed was occupied by Kingsford, the unpopular Judge at Muzaffarpur. Prafulla Chaki shot himself dead while Khudiram Bose was tried and hanged.
The era of revolutionary terrorism had begun. Many secret societies of terrorist youth came into existence. The most famous of these were the Anushilan Samiti whose Dhaka Section alone had 500 branches, and soon revolutionary terrorist societies became active in the rest of the country as well.
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They became so bold as to throw a bomb at the Viceroy Lord Hardinge, while he was riding on an elephant in a state procession at Delhi. The Viceroy was wounded.
The revolutionaries also established centres of activity abroad. In London, the lead was taken by Shyamaji Krishnavarma, VD. Savarkar and Har Dayal, while in Europe Madame Cama and Ajit Singh were prominent leaders.
Terrorism too gradually petered out. In fact, terrorism as a political weapon was bound to fail. It could not mobilise the masses; in fact it had no base among the people.
But the terrorists did make a valuable contribution to the growth of nationalism in India. As a historian has put it, “they gave us back the pride of our manhood.”
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Because of their heroism, the terrorists became immensely popular among their compatriots even though most of the politically conscious people did not agree with their political approach.