The first Christmas Day plot was a conspiracy made by the Indian revolutionary movement in 1909: during the year-ending holidays, the Governor of Bengal organised a ball at his residence in the presence of the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and all the high-ranking officers and officials of the Capital (Calcutta).
In keeping with his predecessor Otto (William Oskarovich) von Klemm, a friend of Lokmanya Tilak, on 6 February 1910, M. Arsenyev, the Russian Consul-General, wrote to St Petersburg that it had been intended to "arouse in the country a general perturbation of minds and, thereby, afford the revolutionaries an opportunity to take the power in their hands.
Police investigations into the murders revealed the organisations quarters in Maniktala suburb of Calcutta and led to a number of arrests, opening the famous Alipore Conspiracy trial.
[citation needed] Narendra Nath carried out a number of robberies during this time to obtain funds..[10] A second setback occurred in 1910 when Shamsul Alam, a Bengal Police officer who was in the process of preparing a conspiracy case against the group, was assassinated by an associate of Jatin Mukherjee named Biren Dutta Gupta.
[citation needed] In 1906, an early Anushilan member, Jatindranath Banerjee (known as Niralamba Swami), departed from Bengal disguised as a Sanyasi, journeying to the United Provinces and later to Punjab.
[15] Bose, a Jugantar member employed at the Forest Institute in Dehradun, worked, possibly independently of Jatin Mukherjee, on the revolutionary movement in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab from October 1910.
Tarak Nath Das, who had left Bengal for the United States in 1907, was among the noted Indian leaders who engaged in political work, maintaining contact with Sri Aurobindo and Jatin Mukherjee.
Welcomed by Taranath Das, he emerged a leading organizer of Indian nationalism amongst the predominantly immigrant labor workers from India, founding the Ghadar movement.
[17] In October of the same year, Rash Behari visited Lahore, where he mobilized Har Dayal's group and initiated a campaign of revolutionary violence, notably highlighted by an assassination attempt on the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, in December 1912.
Recognizing Jatin Mukherjee as a prominent leader, Bose held multiple meetings with him towards the conclusion of 1913, discussing the potential for a pan-Indian revolution reminiscent of the style seen in 1857.
[20] Under the leadership of the archaeologist and historian Max von Oppenheim, the newly established Intelligence Bureau for the East deliberated on strategies to incite nationalist unrest in India.
Germany offered financial support, arms, and military advisors to the plans discussed among the German foreign office, Berlin Committee, and the Indian Ghadar Party in North America.
The Consul General reported back to Berlin that the Bengal revolutionary cell was significant enough to be considered for active support in undermining the British war effort.
[24] Sen returned in November 1914 with intelligence regarding the schemes orchestrated by the Berlin Committee under the leadership of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and the German military attaché Franz von Papen in Washington.
[26] Sen had also introduced Jatin to a Ghadarite leader, Kartar Singh Sarabha, who had returned to India to coordinate the plans for the proposed revolt with the Indian underground.
Rash Behari's plans for mutiny failed when, in February 1915, in a situation simmering in Punjab, Ghadar rose prematurely even before Papen had arranged to ship his arsenal.
Suspecting infiltration, a desperate Rash Behari advanced the D-Day to the 19th; however, due to carelessness, Kirpal managed to relay the information back to the Punjab police before it was too late.
Meanwhile, Papen, in collaboration with Chandrakanta Chakrabarti, the self-proclaimed agent of the Berlin Committee in the United States, organized the initial shipment of arms on the schooner Annie Larsen.
Through a carefully orchestrated plan, the schooner departed from San Diego in March 1915 to meet covertly with a second vessel, the oil tanker SS Maverick, near Socorro Island close to Mexico.
[33] In April 1915, without knowledge of the Annie Larsen plan's failure, Papen, with the assistance of Krupp's American representative Hans Tauscher, organized a second arms shipment.
[35] To provide the Bengal group enough time to capture Calcutta and to prevent reinforcements from being rushed in, mutiny was planned for Burma with arms smuggled in from Neutral Thailand.
Santokh Singh returned to Shanghai tasked to send two expeditions, one to reach the Indian border via Yunnan and the other to penetrate upper Burma and join with revolutionary elements there.
The German Consul General in Shanghai, Knipping, dispatched three officers from the Peking Embassy Guard for training and also coordinated with a Norwegian agent in Swatow to facilitate the smuggling of arms.
The initial details regarding the cargo aboard the Maverick and Jugantar's schemes were disclosed to Beckett, the British Consul in Batavia, by a defecting Baltic-German agent using the alias "Oren."
Another source of information was the German double agent Vincent Kraft, a plantation owner from Batavia, who divulged details about arms shipments from Shanghai to British authorities after his capture.
Upon Kraft's initial arrest, maps of the Bengal coast were discovered on his person, and he willingly provided information indicating that these locations were the planned landing sites for the German arms.
[47] As soon as the information reached the British authorities, they alerted the police, particularly in the delta region of the Ganges, and sealed off all the sea approaches on the eastern coast from the Noakhali–Chittagong side to Orissa.
Following a raid and search at Harry & Sons, the police discovered evidence that directed them to Kaptipada village, where Jatin was residing with Manoranjan Sengupta and Chittapriya Ray Chaudhuri.
By the time they set out, a significant police presence, led by senior European officers from Calcutta and Balasore and supported by an army unit from Chandbali in Mayurbhanj State, had arrived in the vicinity.
During intermittent skirmishes, the group navigated jungles and marshy terrain in heavy rain, eventually establishing a position on September 9, 1915, in an improvised trench amidst undergrowth on a hillock at Chashakhand in Balasore.