Bhagat Singh

Bhagat Singh was born on 28 September 1907 in the village of Banga in Lyallpur district of Punjab, then part of British India and now in Pakistan ^[1]. His family were Sikh farmers with deep political commitments. His father Kishan Singh and his uncle Ajit Singh were both active in agitation against colonial land laws, and Ajit Singh spent years in exile because of his role in the Punjab peasant protests of 1907 ^[2]. The boy grew up hearing stories of arrests, exile, and sacrifice at the family dinner table.

Two events of his childhood and youth shaped him decisively. The first was the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in April 1919, when troops under Brigadier General Reginald Dyer fired on an unarmed crowd, killing hundreds. Accounts of his early life record that the young Bhagat Singh visited the site and carried away soil stained with blood ^[2]. The second was the abrupt suspension of the Non-Cooperation Movement by Mohandas Gandhi in 1922 after protesters burned a police station at Chauri Chaura. Many young Punjabis felt betrayed by the withdrawal, and Bhagat Singh began to look for a politics that did not depend on the patience of a single leader ^[3].

He studied at the D.A.V. school in Lahore and then at National College, an institution founded by the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai as an alternative to government schools. There he read widely in history and political thought, acted in patriotic plays, and met the friends who would later become his closest comrades ^[1].

Anyone tracing the Bhagat Singh biography through the mid 1920s finds a young man moving quickly from student politics to organized revolutionary work. In 1923 or 1924 his family pressed him to marry. He left home for Kanpur instead, writing that his life was pledged to the freedom of the country and that no rest or worldly comfort could tempt him ^[2]. In Kanpur he worked with the journalist Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi and came into contact with members of the Hindustan Republican Association, a group committed to armed struggle against colonial rule ^[3].

Back in Lahore, he helped found the Naujawan Bharat Sabha in 1926, a youth organization that held public meetings, staged lectures on executed revolutionaries, and campaigned against communalism ^[3]. During these years he read Marx, Lenin, Bakunin, and the literature of European socialism, and his politics shifted from simple nationalism toward a socialist vision of independence. That evolution became formal in September 1928, when he and his associates met at Ferozeshah Kotla in Delhi and reorganized the Hindustan Republican Association as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, adding the word socialist at his insistence ^[4].

He also wrote steadily. Under pen names such as Vidrohi, meaning rebel, he contributed essays to Punjabi and Urdu periodicals on martyrdom, untouchability, and communal politics. These pieces, later collected by scholars, show a self-taught intellectual who treated journalism as an extension of revolutionary organizing ^[4].

The turning point came in late 1928. On 30 October, the veteran leader Lala Lajpat Rai led a protest in Lahore against the all-British Simon Commission, which had been sent to review constitutional arrangements without a single Indian member. Police charged the demonstrators with batons, and Lajpat Rai was struck. He died on 17 November 1928, and many nationalists blamed the assault for his death ^[1]. The HSRA resolved to answer the blow. On 17 December 1928, Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru, and Chandrashekhar Azad shot and killed Assistant Superintendent of Police John Saunders in Lahore, having mistaken him for James Scott, the officer who had ordered the charge ^[5]. Posters left in the city declared that the death of Lajpat Rai had been avenged.

Bhagat Singh escaped Lahore in disguise, cutting his hair and beard, a wrenching step for a man raised in a Sikh household. The next action was designed for publicity rather than bloodshed. On 8 April 1929, he and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi while it debated the Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Bill, measures aimed at curbing labor organizing and civil liberties ^[1]. The bombs were deliberately weak and thrown away from the benches; no one was killed. The two men showered the chamber with leaflets declaring that it takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear, then stood and waited to be arrested ^[4].

The arrests were the point. Bhagat Singh intended to use the courtroom as a platform, turning his trial into a public argument about the legitimacy of British rule. In statements to the court he explained that the revolution he sought was not merely a change of masters but the end of exploitation of one person by another ^[4].

The Assembly bomb case ended in June 1929 with sentences of transportation for life for Bhagat Singh and Dutt. Investigators, however, had connected Bhagat Singh to the Saunders killing, and he was moved to Lahore to face what became known as the Lahore Conspiracy Case ^[6]. The proceedings were extraordinary. In May 1930 the colonial government issued an ordinance creating a special tribunal that could try the accused in their absence and allowed no appeal to a higher court in India. Legal scholars have since described the trial as a departure from ordinary standards of justice ^[6].

Prison made him more famous than the actions that put him there. In June 1929 he and his comrades began a hunger strike demanding that Indian political prisoners receive the same treatment as European convicts, including access to books and newspapers and decent food. The strike stretched across months and gripped the national press. One striker, Jatindra Nath Das, died on 13 September 1929 after 63 days without food, and his funeral procession drew enormous crowds along the railway route from Lahore to Calcutta ^[5].

Between hearings and strikes, Bhagat Singh read and wrote at a furious pace. His jail notebook records passages copied from Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, and dozens of other authors ^[4]. His best known essay, Why I Am an Atheist, was composed in the condemned cell in 1930 and published after his death in the Lahore weekly The People. In it he answered the charge that his unbelief was vanity, arguing instead that a revolutionary must subject every inherited idea, including faith, to the test of reason ^[7].

On 7 October 1930 the special tribunal sentenced Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev Thapar to death for the murder of Saunders ^[6]. Petitions for commutation poured in from across India, and the question of the death sentences shadowed the negotiations between Gandhi and the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, in early 1931. The Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931 secured the release of thousands of civil disobedience prisoners, but it did not save the three condemned men, a fact that provoked lasting controversy over how hard Gandhi had pressed the issue ^[3].

The executions were carried out on the evening of 23 March 1931 inside Lahore Central Jail, a day ahead of the announced schedule and at an unusual hour, apparently to forestall public demonstrations ^[1]. Bhagat Singh was 23 years old. Fearing crowds, jail authorities had the bodies taken out through a rear wall and cremated hastily on the bank of the Sutlej river near Hussainiwala. News of the hangings set off strikes, processions, and mourning across the country, and the Karachi session of the Indian National Congress, meeting days later, passed a resolution admiring the bravery of the three men while restating its commitment to nonviolence ^[5].

Few lives this short have left a mark this deep. For anyone asking who was Bhagat Singh, the answer reaches beyond the events of 1928 to 1931 into the way modern South Asia remembers resistance. Within months of his death he was being called Shaheed-e-Azam, the greatest of martyrs, and folk songs about him circulated in Punjabi villages on both sides of what later became the India-Pakistan border ^[2]. His portrait in a felt hat, taken during his imprisonment in 1929, became one of the most reproduced political images of twentieth century India.

Among Bhagat Singh achievements, historians count more than the actions themselves. He helped push socialist ideas into the mainstream of the freedom movement, insisted on secular politics at a moment of rising communal tension, and demonstrated that a trial could be converted into a national classroom ^[4]. Scholars such as S. Irfan Habib and Chaman Lal have edited and analyzed his writings, showing a thinker whose ideas were still developing rapidly at the time of his death ^[4]. In 2009 the historian Neeti Nair argued that his hunger strikes even complicated the neat division between violent and nonviolent politics, since his most effective weapons in prison were suffering and public opinion ^[3].

Commemoration has been constant. The anniversary of his execution is observed in India as Martyrs' Day on 23 March, with ceremonies at Hussainiwala and across Punjab. A bronze statue of him stands in the Parliament complex in New Delhi, museums in Khatkar Kalan and Lahore preserve his letters and belongings, and films in Hindi and Punjabi retell his story for each new generation ^[1]. The basic Bhagat Singh facts, a village childhood, a decade of reading and organizing, two years in prison, and an execution at 23, have become one of the founding narratives of Indian independence.