364 Resisting Publics
became involved in nationalist activities.^13 Three years later, the British
Consul-General to Egypt, Lord Kitchener, in responding to Sir Edward
Grey’s aforementioned request, also noted that “all these students ... have
a tendency to devote themselves to politics, often of a dangerous and sub-
versive character, and they attend meetings where they openly advocate a
revolution in this country ... Unless some check is put on these proceed-
ings, I greatly fear that ... they may easily become a menace to the mainte-
nance of tranquility and order in this country.”^14
e official organ of the British Occupation, the Th Egyptian Gazette,
implied that Wardani’s act was directly inspired by an Indian assassin of
a British official in London the previous year.^15 While we can not connect
Wardani’s actions directly to Madanlal Dhingra, the Indian assassin, there
is considerable evidence that Wardani had met and worked with some of
Dhingra’s “radical nationalist” friends while in Europe. British Criminal
Intelligence even belatedly discovered that there had been a secret Indo-
Egyptian Association during the tenures of both assassins in London,
although they could not conclusively establish that either had belonged
to it.^16 According to Ahmad Fouad Nassar, a founding member of the
Egyptian Society in Lausanne, however, Wardani and Dhingra actually
had met when Wardani was in London in 1908.^17
ertainly Wardani had been well aware of Dhingra’s crime and his C
declared motives, as the Watani party had followed Dhingra’s case closely.
In fact, in the days following the assassination of Curzon-Wylie, the dis-
cussion of Madanlal Dhingra’s nationalist motives was far more openly
discussed in the newspapers of Egypt than they were in India. Everyone in
Egypt knew that an Indian youth had shot a British official in the crowded
vestibule of London’s Imperial Institute and declared his crime to be a
patriotic act in defense of his country. Dhingra maintained the stance that
he acted with moral justification as his victim was part of a system that
“enslaved” millions of Indians. He was hanged on 17 August 1909, and the
Watani Party paper, al-Liwa’, ran afoul of the newly reinstated Egyptian
Press Law on that day for publishing a poem calling the executed assas-
sin a hero.^18 Given that the controversial editor of the paper was one
of Wardani’s good friends, it is hard to imagine that Wardani was not
conscious of the parallels between Dhingra’s actions and those he him-
self would take a few months later. Boutros Ghali himself had expressed