Bal gangadhar tilak, lala lajpat rai and bipin chandra pal as of the members of Extremists

Sir, Bipan Chandra's book claims bal gangadhar tilak, lala lajpat rai and bipin chandra pal as of the members of Extremists. I have a confusion, were they extreme in their actions but not militant.

The confusion comes from word useage and their changing meanings. 'What did these words mean? how and why were these words used to describe different political action? did their meaning change over time?' Here is a brief answer--

Bipan Chandra calls Lal Bal Pal 'extremists' because they and their contemporary detractors called them 'extreme'. To that extent Bipan is entirely correct in his description. Their opponents were 'moderates'. The difference between them was in the strategy they advocated for getting their political demand of revoking the Partition of Bengal fulfilled. The difference was so strong that in 1907 it resulted in a split within the Congress. The extremists walked away from the moderates.
Lal Bal Pal strategy was to prefer hartal, boycott while the moderate strategy was to prefer writing letters, petitions, essays, newspaper articles on their demands.

It is from this point of view that even Gandhi, when he came to India, was presumed to be an extremist, since he advocated 'hartals' as a device to achieve political goals. Since he seemed to disrespect all senior leaders, Annie Besant even called him an 'anarchist', the word that Kejriwal used for himself in 2013-14.

Militant was a word that came to be used much later. In the 1910s, during the period of the Congress split between extremists-moderates, the word for anyone advocating a military-like action against the British was simply called a 'terrorist'. So the boys in Bengal associated with the Anushilan Samiti were called 'terrorist'. The effort by Rash Behari Bose etc. to bomb the Viceroy in 1912 was called 'terrorist'.

Words like moderate, extremist, terrorist were taken from the useages in Europe where the political activists of Russ and France were classified by these terms based on the strategy of action they followed. Moderates talked, extremists disrupted, militants/terrorists killed.

In the period after the end of the Non-Cooperation Movement, the HRA/HSRA noticed that even hartals and julooses did not necessarily change the British heart. So the HSRA began advocating even harsher measures against the British. Like taking revenge against the officer who purportedly killed Lajpat Rai. The boys of the HSRA then shot dead someone else in revenge. And escaped. Still later, when the government wanted to pass laws restricting the freedom of labour to strike work, the HSRA boys said they needed to 'make more noise' in order to have their demand heard. So they exploded a bomb in the Legislative Assembly. Some of them even looted trains and treasuries. So these boys got called 'militants' or 'terrorists'.

As the police swung into action it quickly arrested many of them. The ones who remained free continued with their actions. In Punjab trains were robbed. The University convocation of 1931 was attacked by a bomb injuring the Vice Chancellor and the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab. In that particular episode Durga Das, the man after whom a school and library exists in Chandigarh, was arrested.
Pic. shows the 'extremist' leaders in 1907, Surat Congress. They include, among others, Aurobindo Ghose who escaped to the French enclave of Pondicherry fearing arrest. Can you recognise Aurobindo Ghose here?