Any anti-colonial efforts — and particularly those that crossed racial lines to emphasize solidarity, like Rai and Du Bois’s collective efforts — were met with political repression. Fearing the movement that could emerge from this cross-racial solidarity, imperialist powers, especially the British and their allies, took many actions to restrict the efforts of Indian activists within the United States borders. C.R. Cleveland, the British director of the Department of Criminal Intelligence, requested the American consulate in Calcutta intervene to suppress the Indian nationalists circumventing sedition laws by publishing their anti-colonial papers in the US. While this specific request was rejected by the US State Department, the consul general began questioning United States-bound South Asian immigrants “to determine whether they were in sympathy with sedition in India or not.” On U.S. soil, the British distinctly feared New York City, seeing it as a key ground of Irish-Indian collaboration. The Irish were described by British intelligence as “ready to take up any movement likely to embarrass the British Government,” and likely to forge political alliances with immigrating Indians. 


Consequently, even though many dissident South Asians arrived in the United States with hopes of escaping or avoiding British political surveillance, they were systematically profiled, questioned, and punished by American officials at the recommendation of British intelligence. The British’s requests were particularly appealing to the US intelligence community, playing into their fear that Indian revolutionaries fighting for home rule could inspire similar sentiments in the United States’ colonized Philippines. Both British and American colonial regimes feared rebellion in their profitable colonies: suppression of anti-colonial thought and activism was, to them, necessary, to avoid the entire system toppling to the ground. By the end of World War I, the effects of the government’s repression were widespread. The Justice Department ordered Lajpat Rai to stop circulating anti-British materials, even those printed within the United States. And the New York Times, alongside other large publications, stopped covering the work of prominent activists, preventing the spread of information about the Indian independence movement.
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Front page of the second issue of the Punjabi edition of 'Ghadar,' c. 1913

The West Coast Shift 
By the mid-1910s, as the East Coast movement began to fizzle out, a new political movement emerged across the country in San Francisco: the Ghadar Party. A coalition built from Punjabi Sikh agricultural workers and manual laborers, newly immigrated South Asians, and many of the Bengali and Punjabi thinkers that had first honed their ideas in the pages of Young India or Free Hindusthan, the Ghadar Party tied together decolonial freedom struggles across nations. As a result, the West Coast became a vibrant hub of South Asian political activity, as the base that intellectuals such as Das and Rai had long hoped to form with their publications gradually took root. Through their publication, Ghadar, Ghadar Party activists grew their base, vocally addressed the violent racism and labor exploitation that many immigrants experienced upon arrival in the United States, and wrote for a membership both local and global. They were also able to shift the center of Home Rule organizing by tying together their present conditions in America and former treatment in then-British India, continuing the fight against colonialism and progressing the interests of the South Asian diaspora. Though their journeys through New York might have been brief, anticolonial South Asian intellectuals like Rai, Das, and many others had a profound impact on the years of struggle that would continue.