"...fully functional local economy; for most Punjabis, the revolt had in the end not uprooted as much of their day-to-day lives as they thought. (Some more modern scholarship, it should be noted, strongly disputes this longstanding perspective on the Ghadar Mutiny - stories of Mutineers shaking down families and killing civilians due to suspected pro-British sympathies have emerged in modern India after being suppressed for decades as they raised uncomfortable questions about the legacy of the Mutiny and why the rest of India did not rise in 1915-16 to join the Ghadarites when they are so feted today).
Still, despite this, Punjab was isolated after the recapture of Sindh, and trade via Russia and Afghanistan could not displace access to the full Indian market or the ports of Bombay and Calcutta, and the Bengali revolutionaries had the vast and friendly hinterlands of the North-East and chaotic peripheral China to fall back on. [1] The Mutiny began to come fully unglued with Kitchener's Amritsar Offensive in early March, which lasted a whole month but by mid-April had captured Sikhism's most holy city and thrust the Ghadarite army back towards Lahore, badly battered and having inflicted crippling casualties on it. But this did not come without a cost; tens of thousands of Anglo-Imperial soldiers were killed or badly wounded in their push, the poor logistics of Kitchener's forces were exposed, and more reports of poor treatment of native Indian forces fighting under the Union Jack, including allegations of throwing Hindu men into the line of fire as cannon fodder, continued to trickle out, angering a great many others. The behavior of the Indian Army upon entering Amritsar, out of British hands for close to a year at that point, did not help things; several hundred people were massacred in the sack, and thousands of women were allegedly raped, both by native and Imperial soldiery.
Still, the Battle of Amritsar was a body blow to Ghadar, which now had the distinct credibility of having held out against London for over a year throughout much of Punjab but which had failed to fully ignite a spark across all of India. At a moment when his political identity was starting to form, the Mutiny was thus an incredibly important moment for Bose. It was all that Indian students in Calcutta talked about, especially with small-scale terrorist attacks across Bombay by the Samiti carried out successfully as opposed to the retreating Ghadar forces on the other side of the Raj. Bose had a fairly simple set of theories - that the Ghadar Party had been too dependent on foreign financing and ideologues (that being vast network of thinkers and advocates on the North American West Coast, especially in British Vancouver and in San Francisco in California), too concentrated in Punjab's large but oft-insular Sikh community which gave it limited appeal beyond, a distinct failure to properly coordinate with the Samiti and Jugantar in Bengal, and not being able to speak to the vast Indian population in time to catch fire. With Sikhism's cradle in Amritsar fallen back to Kitchener's hands, Bose suspected it was only a matter of time before Ghadar collapsed completely, though the remarkable violence in the campaign forced British forces to regroup before attempting to push on Lahore that summer.
Nonetheless, while the Ghadarites had not lit a fire in India in February of 1915 as they had hoped, they had lit a spark, and there was no way to undo what had been done. The rage carried through from Ishii Maru to the events in Lahore did not destabilize Indian politics but nonetheless shocked the Indian public, especially in part the British response which was essentially to confine the whole of the country to their cities and grinding India's economy to a halt so it could more easily crush the rebellion. The Indian Police apparatus had swelled and informants ran to the British with even so much as a whisper of discontent, meaning that the civil service's focus began to shift from the governance of the Raj daily to investigations, harassment and documentation. The India Office in London winced at some of these tactics but, with both India and Ireland in crisis simultaneously, felt the hard hand was absolutely necessary and did little to check Kitchener's increasingly tyrannical methods of beating back opposition and pressing onwards into Punjab and keeping Delhi secure; the Ghadarites would scatter once Lahore fell in late June, their revolt defeated on paper, but the fire of passion continued to burn and insurgency in Punjab and neighboring regions would simmer for years to come, emerging as an ulcer for the British nearly as intense as the escalating one in eastern Bengal and northern Burma.
Perhaps nobody exhibited this transformation in public and elite opinion quite like Motilal Nehru, who upon his release from prison in Madras made his famous "Appeal to the Indian People," or Madras Appeal, in which he stated definitively that moderated local control, long a goal of the Indian National Congress (especially its more moderate Naram Dal faction), was "plainly impossible." Nehru had been "converted by facts," as he phrased it, and now identified with Bal Gagandhar Tilak and other hardliners within the INC of Garam Dal, who were definitive in their demand for Swaraj. It seemed plain now to Nehru, both from the ability of Ghadarites to hold out for over a year against the full might of the British Empire and then the British response being so cavalier towards Indian opinion, that India could only sustain itself through self-rule in some form much stronger than what had been proposed previously. The march towards independence was, quite definitively, at its beginning..."
- Bengal Tiger: Subhas Chandra Bose and India
[1] I want to emphasize yet again that there's basically a swath of Asia running from Yunnan through the Lao Highlands to northern Burma and the modern-day Northeast Provinces in India/northern Bangladesh that is essentially ungoverned/ungovernable. That will... be important, and for a long time
