: The Indians Who Pulled Off the Greatest Daily Robbery That Shook the British Raj #IndiaNEWS #History On 21 July 1916, the Marwari community of Barabazar was surprised to see a small group of police

The Indians Who Pulled Off the Greatest Daily Robbery That Shook the British Raj #IndiaNEWS #History
On 21 July 1916, the Marwari community of Barabazar was surprised to see a small group of police conducting raids at the house of the Birla family. It was unthinkable because the Marwaris were loyal to the British. The police were looking for Ghanshyam Das Birla alias GD Birla, who was 22 years old back then. Luckily, he was not present at home but within hours, Hanuman Prasad Poddar along with his friends Fulchand Chowdhury, Jawala Prasad Kanoria and Onkarmal Saraf were arrested. These people were rumoured to be involved in looting the Dalhousie Square area two years ago.
Hanuman, who later became one of the founders of the famous Gita Press, helped the Bengali revolutionaries to smuggle these weapons to different revolutionary organisations under the guise of an organisation called ‘Marwari Sahayak Samiti’. A box of bullets was also kept in GD Birla’s house for some time. The Marwari community of Kolkata strongly condemned this incident and sort of expelled the culprits from the Marwari society.
But what exactly was the case of looting of weapons? How did the Marwaris get involved with the Bengalis in this matter?
In the pages of the history of the armed revolution of Bengal, this incident is recorded as the Rodda Arms Heist, which took place on 26 August 1914. The looted weapons were actively used in the Ghadar Mutiny in 1915. The use of these guns is also directly connected with other encounters like Bagha Jatin’s final encounter in the banks of Buribalam River with the British Army, the shootout at Dhaka’s Kalta Bazar where revolutionary Nalini Bagchi and Tarini Majumdar laid their lives after killing a Head constable and seriously injuring one sub-inspector.
The Sedition report of 1918 (Page 44) says “the pistols so distributed were used in 54 cases of dacoity or murder or attempts at dacoity and murder subsequent to August 1914???. Some books mention that at least one of these looted weapons was passed on to the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA), who conducted the Kakori train robbery in 1925, and at least one was used in the Chittagong Arms heist in 1930.
Most of the newspapers of the time printed this incident with importance. The Statesman called the robbery ‘The Greatest Daylight Robbery’.
Background of Rodda Arms Robbery
Entry to Rodda Office godown.
After the partition of Bengal in 1905, the armed movement in the state gathered pace. There were as many as three political murders by the revolutionaries between 1908 and 1910. Finally, a bomb was hurled at Lord Hardinge in Open Street of New Delhi in broad daylight in the year 1911.
Rashbehari Bose wanted a massive armed revolution pan India, which required a large stockpile of weapons.

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