Bhagat Singh
The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting-stone of ideas.
—Bhagat Singh
He was a very unusual revolutionary. His life was less about guns and bombs and more about ideas and ideals. He loved books and wandered around with them in his pocket, lending them to anyone who was interested. He spent hours in the Dwarkadas Library in Lahore, reading about the revolutionary movements of the world and dreaming of leading a revolution in India. He set up a library for his fellow revolutionaries and they would hold long discussions on socialism—especially Marxism—and the purpose of a mass uprising. He is said to have popularized the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ When he was in prison, Bhagat Singh’s lonely jail cell was packed with books that kept him company.
Bhagat Singh was born on 28 September 1907 in Khatkar Kalan village in the Lyallpur District of Punjab. His father Kishan Singh Sandhu was a farmer. His uncle Ajit Singh was a revolutionary who had escaped abroad to avoid being arrested and was a source of inspiration for young Bhagat Singh. He was educated at the Dayanand Anglo Vedic School and College in Lahore, and while still a teenager, he was joining protest marches against the British government. Later he wrote for and edited Urdu newspapers in Amritsar and continued to write till his death.
Like many patriotic young men of the times, Bhagat Singh was first drawn to the Congress party but soon became disenchanted by their political strategies. He was an enthusiastic participant in the Non-cooperation Movement, but when Gandhi suspended the agitation after Chauri Chaura, he was deeply disappointed. He was not convinced by Gandhi’s belief in non-violence and began to look for another path to freedom—he came to believe that revolutionary action was the only answer. Young men in Punjab, the United Provinces and Bengal, inspired by the revolutionary movements in Russia, Ireland and Italy, began to join secret societies. They started the assassination of unpopular British officials, and looted banks and the government treasury to finance their propaganda campaign as well as the buying of arms and training of terrorists. Among the secret societies were Yugantar and Anushilan in Bengal. The revolutionaries of the north met at Ferozshah Kotla in Delhi in 1928 and formed the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army.
In Bengal, the most daring act of the revolutionaries was the raid of the Chittagong Armoury, led by Surya Sen. They knew very well that a small band of fighters taking on the armed might of the British Army had little chance of succeeding, but they wanted to show the people that it was possible to challenge the power of the government. On the night of 18 April 1930 one group led by Ganesh Ghosh captured the police armoury at Chittagong, while another led by Lokenath Paul took over the Auxiliary Force Armoury. They captured a number of guns but could not find the ammunition, and this hindered their campaign. They realized they could not hold on to the armouries once the army arrived and sixty-five revolutionaries escaped into the Chittagong hills where they were soon surrounded by thousands of troops. In a fierce battle eighty British soldiers and twelve freedom fighters were killed. Surya Sen managed to escape and continued with the struggle, often given shelter by poor peasants of the region.
The exploits of the revolutionaries fired the imagination of the younger generation. This was also the time when women came forward to join the revolutionaries. When Surya Sen was eventually captured, a girl called Kalpana Dutt was captured with him. He was hanged in 1934 and Dutt given a life sentence. There was also Pritilata Waddedar who died during a raid; two schoolgirls Suniti Chowdhury and Santi Ghosh shot dead a District Magistrate. Bina Das, while going up to receive her degree at a university convocation, shot point-blank at the governor of Bengal. Sadly, these individual acts of courage may have fuelled passions against the British rule, but in real terms they did not do much to weaken the British government’s hold on the country.
Then in the United Provinces there was a train robbery at Kakori railway station, which electrified the nation. Ramprasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Roshan Singh, Rajendra Lahiri and Chandrashekhar Azad held up the 8-Down Mail at the small station of Kakori just outside Lucknow and escaped with the railway treasury. The government immediately cracked down on the revolutionaries and all of them except Chandrashekhar Azad were captured. Four were hanged and twenty-one young men sentenced to jail in the Kakori Conspiracy Case. Chandrashekhar Azad would then join Bhagat Singh in Punjab for a while till he was killed in a shoot-out in a park in Allahabad.
In 1928 Lala Lajpat Rai had died in Lahore probably from injuries sustained after a beating by the police while leading a procession against the Simon Commission. Bhagat Singh idolized Lajpat Rai and it led him, Shivaram Rajguru, Sukhdev Thapar and Chandrashekhar Azad to assassinate a police officer named Saunders who had ordered the lathi charge. The original plan was to kill the police chief, but they killed Saunders instead. The Hindustan Socialist Republican Army put up posters justifying the revolutionary policy of personal assassination by saying, ‘the murder of a leader respected by millions of people at the unworthy hands of an ordinary police official … was an insult to the nation. It was the bounden duty of young men of India to efface it … we regret to have had to kill a person, but he was part and parcel of that inhuman and unjust order which has to be destroyed.’
After a while, there was change in the thinking of the revolutionaries, especially those led by Bhagat Singh. He and his comrades, who were all educated, thoughtful young men, were gradually coming to the conclusion that single acts of terrorism could get them publicity, but they would not lead to freedom. They had finally realized that for a freedom struggle to succeed people had to rise together and overwhelm the colonial power, and that was not happening. So they felt more propaganda for their cause was required. On 8 April 1929 Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt went into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi and threw bombs and leaflets into the well of the chamber from the visitor’s gallery. The bombs were small explosives that did not hurt anyone and Bhagat Singh said they were thrown ‘to make the deaf hear’.
The plan was to get arrested and promote their cause during the trial. Soon the authorities discovered Bhagat Singh’s connection to the Saunders killing, and Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar were also arrested. Soon their names were on every ones lips. As Jawaharlal Nehru writes, ‘He became a symbol; the act was forgotten, the symbol remained, and within a few months each town and village in Punjab, and to a lesser extent in the rest of northern India, resounded with his name.’ Bhagat Singh’s aim of creating awareness had succeeded brilliantly.
The whole country watched the trial with bated breath as Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev used every opportunity to popularize their cause. They would enter the court fearlessly shouting ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ and singing Bismil’s song, ‘Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil me hai’ (our hearts are filled with the desire for martyrdom) and ‘Mera rang de basanti chola’ (dye my clothes in the saffron hues of courage and sacrifice). At that time Gandhi and the viceroy Lord Irwin were negotiating issues, leading to the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. In spite of the fact that he did not agree with Bhagat Singh’s strategy of violence and terrorism, Gandhi pleaded with the viceroy for his life but failed to convince the government. Gandhi faced a hostile reception when he arrived in Karachi for the Congress session as many felt that he had not done enough. Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were found guilty and hanged on 23 March 1931. Bhagat Singh was only twenty-four years old.
He was a man of action, but also an intellectual whose beliefs were still evolving. Bhagat Singh was a surprisingly mature thinker for someone so young and his voracious reading had by 1929 already led to his doubting the usefulness of terrorism and individual acts of assassination. His study of socialism and Marxism had made him believe that any freedom struggle could succeed only if the people rose up in protest. He began the Punjab Naujawan Bharat Sabha in 1926 to take this message to the peasants in the rural area and the factories workers in the towns.
Bhagat Singh was also very aware of the dangers of communalism and at many public meetings he told the people that it was as dangerous as colonialism as it could divide the nation. As a matter of fact, he even criticized his hero Lajpat Rai when Rai began to take on the role of the spokesman of the Hindus. Among the rules of the Punjab Naujawan Bharat Sabha was: ‘To have nothing to do with communal bodies or other parties which disseminate communal ideas’ and ‘to create a spirit of general toleration among the public considering religion as a matter of personal belief of man’. A week before his death he wrote an article titled ‘Why I Am an Athiest’ and in it he said he was ‘trying to stand like a man with an erect head to the last; even on the gallows’.
The revolutionary movement created a band of immensely popular young martyrs, but the movement slowly died in the face of a systematic and ruthless government crackdown. The revolutionaries failed because even though their individual acts of bravery and martyrdom were idolized by people, they did not lead to a mass uprising. As a matter of fact, they did not know how to organize such a movement among people. What they did achieve was create a greater awareness of the freedom struggle. They filled the hearts and minds of the people with a passion for independence and the courage to step out and embrace every sacrifice. They made Indians conscious of their rights and inspired them to take pride in their martyrdom. It was this selfless, fiery eagerness to court even death for his convictions that made ‘Shaheed’ Bhagat Singh an inspiration in his life and a legend afterwards.