"...nearing the anniversary of its first year. The priority, as autumn deepened and the threat to Delhi and Bombay lessened, became bringing the hammer down on revolutionary activity as the India Field Force and Indian Army prepared for an offensive in early 1916 to take back Punjab and parts of Rajasthan and Sindh by force. Kitchener's semi-successful policy in Ireland had been to impose a form of strict martial law across most of the island and something similar was extended in India, though with a uniquely subcontinental twist.
Unlike in Ireland, Lord Kitchener had in fact served for a lengthy period of time in India and had a fairly decent (though like any Briton, superficial) understanding of the Raj and its culture, politics, and geographical divisions. In a letter to the Cecil government defending his "slow pace of operations," Kitchener replied calmly, "The Subcontinent comprises an area greater in mass than France, Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary put together, and dwarfs them in the number of cultures and peoples who inhabit it. There cannot be one policy for the whole of the Raj any more than there is one policy for the whole of the European Continent." Punjab proper was nearly the size of Germany, and Britons were outnumbered severely within it; Kitchener knew that he would have one opportunity to pierce the heart of the Mutiny and slay the Ghadarite dragon, and the threat in the rest of India had to be containe dbefore he could do so.
As such, Kitchener drafted a strategy in which India was divided into zones that carried three classifications, Areas 1, 2 and 3. A "1" designated a province or territory in outright revolt, such as Punjab, the thus-unreachable North-west Provinces and, increasingly, parts of Bengal; a 2 designated an area "at risk," and this encompassed the United Provinces and the Bombay Presidency; and finally a 3 was an area of little concern, such as most of the native states save Rajasthan and Orissa and the Madras Presidency in the South of India. In the 1s, strict curfews from sundown to sunup were applied, pass-cards were handed out to the population that were required to be presented upon demand, and the use of rail transport was limited to only military operations. In the 2s, rail transport was limited to the military and those with permission to travel such as civil servants. Kitchener's strategy was to choke off the easiest means for Ghadarite or Samiti terrorists to intermix and connect with each other to coordinate, and thus strangle any nascent revolt in its crib across the rest of the Raj, with the help of the Special Branch of the India Police Service that had built a remarkable network of informants over the past year even as assassinations of officers and detectives escalated.
The problem with this strategy, of course, was that while it was targeted at Punjab it left other parts of India deeply resentful - not to the point that the pan-Indian rebellion that Punjabis had hoped for was in the offing, but nonetheless deepening the mainstream Home Rule movement's distaste for Britain. Kitchener made matters worse by throwing a number of activists, such as the famed Lal Bal Pal trio as well as longtime moderates such as Motilal Nehru, in prison, which only made them martyrs despite fairly short sentences. It was also the case that while the quick deployment of the IFF in the spring had probably prevented the fall of Sind and the disintegration of British rule in much of the west and east, the Ghadarites were no more close to being driven out of Punjab into the mountains of the frontier, and indeed the revolutionaries had rapidly established connections with Afghan chieftains and Nasrullah Khan, the younger brother of the neutral but softly Anglophile King Habibullah. Nasrullah, despite Russian distaste for his conservative Islamic worldview, had made himself an excellent middleman for smuggling weapons via his favored officers in the Afghan Army to the border city of Peshawar and from there into Punjab, northern Rajasthan and even deep into Balochistan and Sind.
Though British agents were fairly convinced that Russia was the culprit behind keeping the Afghans curiously if not suspiciously well-equipped starting in 1915, the bigger problem was the festering sore that far-eastern Bengal, now known in modern India as Assam, was becoming. The proximity of this area to poorly-controlled areas of China that were influenced by both the revolutionary Guomindang Party that advocated the extirpation of European colonialism in Asia and by the nuclei of budding opium-trading organizations in the hills of Yunnan especially meant that the semi-warlordism of south-western China provided an ample supply of rifles, hand grenades and even training grounds for the Samiti; key members of the rapidly-growing organization such as the Ghosh brothers or longtime, French-educated bombmaker Ullaskar Dutta spent as much if not more time in the hills of Assam or across the rugged frontier in Yunnan as they did in Bengal's major cities, where a massive bombing campaign erupted in the last months of 1915 to signal that while a bold move such as Ghadar revolting openly in Punjab was unlikely to follow in the east, a more pernicious, long-term problem was potentially emerging there.
All this was to say that Kitchener, by the end of 1915, had saved India from ruin but found himself increasingly unable to take the next steps to fully put out the fire that had been lit in February with the initial Mutiny, but certainly not without a lack of trying. With criticism mounting even from the conservative government in London, Kitchener launched a major operation in Sind Province and eastern Balochistan in December of 1915, stepping up patrols, attacking known rebel hideouts and tripling the number of forces moving through Karachi. The Sind Offensive, as it became known, as a qualified success; it gave Imperial soldiers, especially the famously daring and brutal Canadians [1], experience with counter-insurgency operations rather than the type of field offensives that had occurred around Panipat and Kaithal in May and June. Both would be needed as Kitchener plotted out a push towards Amritsar in January or February - it would be a triumph to put down the rebellion before its first birthday, after all..."
- Burning Punjab
[1] A group that had the most feared reputation in the Second Boer War and First World War
