Pulin Behari Das (24 January 1877 - 17 August 1949) was an Indian revolutionary and the founder-president of the Dhaka Anushilan Samiti. Pulin passed the Entrance examination from Faridpur Zilla School in 1894. He attended the Dhaka College and became the laboratory assistant and demonstrator whiles still a student at the college. In September, 1906, Bipin Chandra Pal and Pramatha Nath Mitra took a tour of the newly created province of Eastern Bengal and Assam. Pulin was nominated to organize the Dhaka chapter of the Anushilan Samiti. In October, Pulin founded the Dhaka chapter with 80 young men. Pulin was a remarkable organizer and the Samiti soon had over 500 branches in the province. 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 masterminded the plot to eliminate Basil Copleston Allen, the erstwhile 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. He staved off the rioters bravely with barely a handful of his associates. In early 1908, Pulin organized the sensational Barrah Dacoity. The audacious dacoity was committed in broad daylight by a group of revolutionaries at the residence of the zamindar of Barrah, under the Nawabganj police station in the district of Dhaka. The fund was used for buying arms and ammunitions. In 1908, he was arrested along with Bhupesh Chandra Nag, Shyam Sundar Chakravarti, Krishna Kumar Mitra, Subodh Mallick and Ashwini Dutta and interred in Montgomery jail. After his release from jail in 1910, he began to rejuvenate the revolutionary activities. Around this time the Dhaka group began to operate independently of the Kolkata group. After the demise of Pramatha Nath Mitra, the two bodies separated. In July, 1910, Pulin was arrested again along with 46 other revolutionaries on charges of sedition. Later another 44 revolutionaries were arrested. This came to be known as the Dhaka Conspiracy Case. 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 and Vinayak Savarkar. After the war Pulins term was reduced and he was released from jail in 1918 but kept in house arrest for another year. In 1919, 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. Pulin, however, remained a 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. 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.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:14:41 +0000
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