It’s easy to be mistaken by this picture of a grandfatherly 95 year-old. He was in fact one of the most dangerous men in British India. So feared was he by the British that he was held for 16 years in near solitary confinement for fear of the revolution he tried to spark. contd.. 
This is Sohan Singh Bhakna, co-founder of the Ghadr Party. When India joined WW1, Punjabi men were vigorously encouraged to join the Indian Army, even Congress & Mahatma Gandhi supported recruitment.Opposing the consensus were the violent and vociferous Ghadrs, or revolutionaries 
He was active in the early nationalist movement before becoming a pioneer migrant to the Pacific Northwest of the USA in 1909. In America there was no lack of racism & discrimination toward the ‘Hindoo’ labourers and Bhakna rapidly joined an early Indian labour movement 
He co-founded the Ghadr party agitating for the overthrow of the British by means of an armed revolution. The Ghadrs viewed the Congress movement as soft so adopted a harder stance with their principle strategy to entice Indian soldiers into armed revolt against the British
Their revolutionary plans included smuggling arms to the passengers of the Komagatu Maru on their return to India, making overtures to the German Embassy in the US, pumping out revolutionary messages to Indian soldiers via their prolific pamphleteering.
Their most seditious and dangerous plot was to coordinate violent armed revolutionary activity with Indian soldiers in SE Asia. Alarmed, the British promptly arrested Sohan Singh as he tried to enter India in 1914 and tried for conspiracy.
Found guilty, he was sentenced to death-later commuted to life imprisonment in The Andaman Islands. There Sohan Singh settled into a period of revolt and activism with repeated hunger strikes to improve the conditions for his fellow prisoners.
Both in the Andamans and back in India where he was imprisoned until 1930 he carried out hunger strikes for Sikh prisoner’s religious rights, the rights of lower caste Indian prisoners and in support of his fellow revolutionary Bhagat Singh.
By the outbreak of WW2, he had been free 10 years but remained a fearsome political voice. War brought new rules, and the Government interred the now 70-year-old Sohan Singh for 3 years in an Indian jail lest he revive his violent tendencies during their wartime vulnerability 
He lived another 20 years after Indian Independence and the Partition, a constant and prolific voice in early Indian politics. He died in 1968, ending a phenomenal life of 98 years, in his home district of Amritsar. 
