Whose Bhagat Singh is he anyway?

A few leaders across the world remain in public imagination long after they are gone; but the narratives around them continuously alter. Some become national or cultural symbols. William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy and Rabindranath Tagore became icons of universal literary and cultural values. Ho Chi Minh, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi were symbols of anti-colonial struggles. Simón Bolivar and José Marti, icons of Latin American nationalism. Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — torch-bearers of revolution in Latin America. Bhagat Singh and Guevara continue to be youth icons world over though they each earned their name in two different corners of it.

Bhagat Singh died young — at 23, but had already earned fame in that short lifespan. In the last two years of his life — from April 1929 to March 1931 — he was extremely popular in the then undivided India, which included today’s Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Born on September 28, 1907 at Lyallpur Bange, now in the Faisalabad district of Pakistan, he made his mark in public life at 17 when he formed the Naujawan Bharat Sabha in Lahore along with friends. He had always been politically active, as had been his family. His father, Kishan Singh, and uncles — Ajit Singh and Swaran Singh — were part of the Congress party as well as the freedom struggle. The three of them went to jail many times, Swaran Singh died young, at 23, after he contracted TB in prison. Ajit Singh was a close associate of Lala Lajpat Rai and was sent to Mandalay jail in Burma in 1907 for organising peasants — victims of debt then, as they are now. Ajit Singh was later exiled to Latin America for 38 long years — till March 1947, when Jawaharlal Nehru, as the interim Prime Minister, facilitated his return.

Bhagat Singh and his comrades such as Chandra Shekhar Azad were disillusioned with the Congress after Gandhi withdrew his massive Satyagraha — non-cooperation movement — in 1922 following the burning of a police station in Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur. Bhagat Singh, hardly 15 then, and Azad had wholeheartedly participated in the movement, and Azad even suffered 30 lashes on his back for it. Legend has it that he shouted “Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai!” after each lashing.

The movement’s withdrawal convinced Bhagat Singh and Azad that the Congress was incapable of fighting British colonialism. Only a revolutionary movement, they believed, could overthrow the British. In 1922, Bhagat Singh joined Lahore’s National College, where he met like-minded men like Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Sukhdev, Yashpal, Jaidev and Ram Chandra. Some of their teachers such as Chhabil Das and Jaichander Vidyalankar were linked to revolutionaries across the country. At the college’s Dwarkadas library, Bhagat Singh read about the Soviet socialist revolution led by Lenin in 1917. He directed and acted in many nationalistic plays, one of which was watched by Sarojini Naidu.

The Naujawan Bharat Sabha was modelled on Mazzini’s ‘Young Italy’ and Bhagat Singh was elected its general secretary. He went to Kanpur with the names provided by his History teacher Vidyalankar and met revolutionary leaders such as Shiv Verma, Jaidev Kapoor and Bejoy Kumar Sinha. Following the efforts of Sachindra Nath Sanyal, revolutionary groups such as Jugantar and Anushilan had merged to form the new Hindustan Republican Association/Army (HRA). In Kanpur, Bhagat Singh worked as a journalist in the Hindi paper Pratap, edited by Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, and wrote under the pseudonym Balwant Singh. Bhagat Singh was later associated with Maharathi and Arjun — both Hindi journals from Delhi, and also Kirti in Punjabi, and assumed different pseudonyms in each.

The first and most objective narrative of Bhagat Singh’s life emerged from his early life — of a young mind in quest of knowledge and freedom. Interestingly, in the latest narratives around him, Bhagat Singh is acknowledged as a well-read thinker-revolutionary with a socialist vision for post-liberation India. This objective image of Bhagat Singh has, and still is distorted wittingly or unwittingly. Alarmingly, of late it is being done consciously to undermine his ideological beliefs, which come through clearly in his writings. His complete works, which include Jail Notebook, letters and essays in Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English, have been published in multiple Indian languages. Hence, he has become a difficult subject to appropriate. Nevertheless, attempts are being made both by the right-wing and some Sikh extremists to do so.

Even after becoming a part of the HRA, Bhagat Singh and his comrades continued working for Naujawan Bharat Sabha and Punjab Students Union. The HRA carried out the Kakori Rail dacoity in August 1925 and subsequently lost Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaquallah, Roshan Singh and Rajender Lahiri. By the end of 1927 all four were executed.

Bhagat Singh convinced the remaining HRA members to abandon terrorist violence. He was inspired by the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union and wanted to adopt its path for Indian liberation. The HRA subsequently held a meeting at Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla grounds in September 1928 and rechristened itself as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association/Army (HSRA). While the armed wing, helmed by Azad, was kept alive, the focus shifted to political propaganda — liberating India from colonialism and capitalist exploitation, and building a socialist society.

Politics and freedom

However, before the HSRA could actively pursue the political path, the Simon Commission arrived, and Bhagat Singh and friends convinced Lala Lajpat Rai to lead a mass procession against the commission in Lahore, even though they were critical of Rai leaning towards politics tinged with religion.

The procession was brutally lathi-charged by the Lahore police led by SSP James Scott and DSP JP Saunders, and it soon resulted in the death of Rai. A call to avenge Rai’s death was made by Basanti Devi, widow of Chittaranjan Dass, the radical Congress leader from Bengal, following which Bhagat Singh and comrades assassinated Saunders, exactly a month after Rai’s death.

The young men knew they were running out of time. In April 1929, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt hurled bombs in the Central assembly, Delhi, to protest against two anti-people bills — the Trade Disputes Bill and the Public Safety Bill — pushed through by the British government as ordinances. Bhagat Singh had by then familiarised himself with Auguste Vaillant, the French revolutionary who had lobbed a bomb in the French parliament in 1893. He was executed a year later. Vaillant intended “not to kill or harm”, but “to make the deaf hear.” Bhagat Singh was inspired by Vaillant and their later lives bear striking similarities. Both remained avid learners in their final days in prison; Bhagat Singh was found reading moments before his execution, as was Vaillant; both refused to cover their faces at the gallows, and are considered to have shown exemplary courage at the moment of death — going to the gallows singing. Both remained atheists till the end — refusing religious rites before the rope fell around their necks.

It was only after the Delhi assembly incident that the police discovered Bhagat Singh’s involvement in Saunders’s assassination. A month after the Delhi trial concluded in June 1929, the Lahore conspiracy trial began. He was awarded the ‘transportation for life’ sentence in the first, and death for the second in October 1930. The trials altered the public perception of Bhagat Singh and his friends. They challenged the authority of colonial courts, they shouted slogans, sang patriotic songs, and were beaten up publicly. They went on a hunger strike in prison for 150 days. All this made news nationally and internationally. By the time Bhagat Singh was executed on March 23, 1931, along with Rajguru and Sukhdev, he was no longer just a name. Gandhi was damned for “not saving Bhagat Singh’s life!” Gandhi and the Congress party, while critical of their action, praised their bravery, thus setting the foundation for an immortal, nevertheless incomplete image of Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh. Credit must go to Periyar, the Tamil politician and social activist, for giving Bhagat Singh a realistic portrayal in his editorial in the weekly Kudai Arsu. He also published Bhagat Singh’s essay ‘Why I am an Atheist’ in Tamil. When professor Bipan Chandra wrote an introduction to the essay in the late 1970s, he called Bhagat Singh “a Marxist in the making.” The publication of Bhagat Singh’s major works, including the Jail Notebook, in 1994 only enhanced this identity and further nuanced into that of a “Marxist socialist revolutionary.” This identity is now contested by the right-wing, which wants him to be nothing more than the “nationalist revolutionary.” Constricting him thus is an insult to Bhagat Singh’s larger worldview and influence. He is a popular icon in neighbouring Pakistan, as well as in other countries.

The shape-shifting narratives around Bhagat Singh is evident in his visual represention too. Till the 1980s, the widely-circulated image of the revolutionary was a photograph, taken in a Delhi studio in 1929, in which he wears a hat. However, with the rise of identity politics in Punjab and elsewhere, his “hat-wearing image” has been gradually replaced by a painting in which he sports a turban. That image, the product of an artist’s imagination, has attained so much traction and heft that a turbaned statue has replaced a hat-wearing one in Bhagat Singh’s ancestral village, Banga. Recently, in Chhattisgarh, his hat-wearing statue was pulled down by Sikh religious groups. The fact that he was an atheist is obviously lost on them.

Bhagat Singh has become a hotly-contested political subject lately. In 2009, both the Punjab and Haryana governments had urged the centre to rename the Chandigarh airport after him. But the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) wanted to name it after their little-known leader Mangal Sen, and then chose to go silent on the matter. While momentum gathers on naming the Gorakhpur airport after Yogi Gorakhnath, and the Agra airport after Deendayal Upadhyaya, none in the right-wing wants Bhagat Singh’s name for an airport or a university. However, no attempts to appropriate him are spared.

Chaman Lal, retired professor from Jawaharlal Nehru University, is the author of Understanding Bhagat Singh

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