How Bhagat Singh Rose Against the Raj and Took the Gallows

The two most famous actions of Bhagat Singh's life were meant to do very different things, and understanding that is the key to understanding him. The killing of Saunders on 17 December 1928 was retaliation — a public answer to Lala Lajpat Rai's death, aimed at the police officer the HSRA blamed. There was even a tragic error: they had actually meant to target J.A. Scott, the superintendent who ordered the lathi-charge, and shot the junior officer Saunders by mistake. Bhagat Singh fled Lahore in disguise, famously cutting his hair and beard to slip past the police cordon. But he soon concluded that scattered assassinations could not free a nation; they could only briefly frighten it. The Assembly action of 8 April 1929 was the opposite in spirit. The government was pushing the repressive Public Safety Bill and Trade Disputes Bill; Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw harmless bombs into an empty part of the chamber precisely so that no one would die, then stayed put to be arrested. Their aim was a trial, a platform, and the chance to explain their politics to the whole country. As their leaflet put it, borrowing a French anarchist's line, 'it takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear'. Violence, for them, was a megaphone — not the message.

Bhagat Singh — the HSRA's leading thinker and organiser, a voracious reader who wanted revolution grounded in ideas, not just daring. Sukhdev Thapar — his close friend and fellow strategist from Lahore, a key HSRA organiser, hanged alongside him. Shivaram Rajguru — the Maharashtrian revolutionary who fired with Bhagat Singh in the Saunders action and shared the gallows. Batukeshwar Dutt — who threw the Assembly bombs beside Bhagat Singh, was sentenced to transportation for life, survived to see independence, and died in relative neglect in 1965. Chandra Shekhar Azad — the fiery HSRA commander who evaded capture and died fighting police in an Allahabad park in February 1931. Jatindra Nath Das — the young revolutionary whose 63-day hunger strike for prisoners' rights ended in his death in September 1929, galvanising the country. Lala Lajpat Rai — the revered nationalist leader whose death after a police lathi-charge triggered the Saunders killing. J.P. Saunders and J.A. Scott — the British police officers at the centre of the retaliation, the junior man shot in place of the intended senior. Together they formed a compact web of comrades, victims and adversaries whose collision became the Lahore Conspiracy Case.

The deeper story of Bhagat Singh is intellectual, and it is often lost beneath the image of the gun. In his prison years he read constantly — the jail authorities' own records show him requesting works on socialism, economics, Russian history and revolution — and he filled a notebook, later published as his 'Jail Notebook', with hundreds of extracts from Marx, Lenin, Rousseau, Bertrand Russell and others. His politics were explicitly socialist: he argued that swaraj must mean not merely swapping white rulers for brown ones, but ending the exploitation of workers and peasants, and he coined for the masses the slogan of the revolution as the transfer of power to the labouring people. He grew critical of pure terrorism and of the cult of individual heroism, writing that revolution needed the awakening of ordinary workers and farmers, not a handful of bomb-throwers. Most strikingly, in his 1930 essay 'Why I Am an Atheist', written from the condemned cell, he refused to turn to God for comfort as death neared, insisting that faith should not be a crutch and that reason, not fear or vanity, had led him to reject religion. Here was a young man facing the gallows who chose to argue about ideas rather than plead for his life — turning his cell into a lecture hall for a socialism he believed India would one day need.

The human weight of these years fell hardest inside the prison. Held under the Lahore Conspiracy Case, Bhagat Singh and his comrades launched a hunger strike in 1929 demanding to be treated as political prisoners rather than common criminals — proper food, books, newspapers and dignity. The strike stretched for weeks and gripped the country's newspapers; the death of Jatindra Nath Das after 63 days without food, in September 1929, turned the prisoners into household names and shamed the administration. Bhagat Singh himself starved for months, force-fed and weakened, yet kept up the fight. Outside, his defiance electrified a generation; 'Inquilab Zindabad', the slogan he made famous, became the heartbeat of the freedom movement. When the death sentences came, petitions poured in and even leaders who disagreed with his methods pleaded for mercy. The executions on 23 March 1931 — carried out quietly and, unusually, in the evening, with the bodies secretly cremated at Hussainiwala on the Sutlej — were meant to avoid a public spectacle. They failed. News of the hangings brought grief and anger across India, hardened many against the Raj, and gave the freedom struggle three of its most enduring martyrs. For countless ordinary Indians, the loss of a 23-year-old who could have chosen a quiet life made the cost of freedom suddenly, painfully personal.

In his own lifetime, Bhagat Singh was, to the colonial state, a wanted terrorist — a young man on the run, tried in a special tribunal, and hanged as a threat to order. To much of the nationalist mainstream he was admired but awkward: Gandhi and the Congress leadership honoured his courage yet distanced themselves from his methods, and the debate over whether the Congress did enough to save him still stirs argument. His socialism and atheism made him harder still to absorb neatly. Today the picture has changed almost beyond recognition. Bhagat Singh has become one of the most universally claimed figures in South Asia — his moustached, hatted photograph on posters, T-shirts, films and political banners of every stripe, from the left he actually belonged to, to nationalists who quietly drop his atheism. In India, 23 March is observed as Shaheed Diwas, Martyrs' Day; in Pakistan, activists in Lahore have long campaigned to rename the Shadman Chowk area, where the gallows once stood, in his honour. That very universality is double-edged: it keeps him alive but often flattens him, celebrating the martyr while forgetting the reader who wrote about class struggle and reason. The honest 'now' holds both — the icon and the inconvenient thinker underneath.

Bhagat Singh still matters because he refused to let his death be the whole point of his life. It would have been easy to remember him only as a brave young man who threw a bomb and swung from a rope; the harder, truer memory is of someone who used his brief time to think hard about what freedom was even for. His central argument — that political liberty without economic and social justice is a half-measure, that swapping rulers is not the same as ending exploitation — is a question independent India, and the wider subcontinent, are still arguing over today. So is his defence of reason over dogma, and his warning against turning any leader, himself included, into an unquestioned idol. There is a caution in his story too. He was young, and some of his choices — the killing of a man shot in error, the faith that spectacular violence could awaken a nation — he himself came to question in prison. To honour him honestly is to take his ideas as seriously as his sacrifice: to read the essays as well as garland the portrait. The loud voice he wanted to reach the deaf was never really the bomb. It was the argument the bomb was meant to carry — and that argument still asks something of us.