There was an unexpected knock on the door. It was still a couple of hours before morning prayers. Perhaps it was his younger brother in need of something for sehri. The entire cycle of life had been turned upside down because of Ramzan. Shops and eateries remained open till sehri, then were closed the entire day to reopen around the time of aftari. Iqbal Qaiser opened the door to find a posse of police officials at his door, some in civilian clothes. Without an explanation he was asked to sit in the police van and driven to the Township Police Station.
‘A couple of our friends had been arrested for the murder of this other friend of ours, who belonged to the Ahle-Hadith group. Of those arrested, one was a Shia while the other was an Ahmadi. It was being framed as a sectarian murder,’ Iqbal Qaiser told me at his house in Township on a quiet Sunday morning. Only a few restaurants serving breakfast were open, as the market was still in deep slumber. A cyclist rode down the street ringing his bell before the impending turn.
‘But I was not being questioned about the murder. Instead they were asking me about my poem. Why did you write this poem, what does it mean, who asked you to write it? I had recently returned from a trip to India, so they were asking me questions about the trip. Why did I go, who did I meet there? What was my agenda? For thirty-four days, I was detained at the station without any official report against me. For thirty-four days they only asked about the poem.’
About fifteen-odd days prior to his arrest, Iqbal Qaiser, a young upcoming Punjabi poet, had been invited to recite his poetry at a conference arranged at the historic Faletti’s Hotel. Just off Mall Road, adjacent to the provincial Parliament, this hotel, constructed in 1880, is regarded as one of the finest in the city.44 Organized when martial law was at its peak in 1983, by several nationalist Punjabi organizations along with splinters of socialist and communist political parties, this widely attended conference was the first of its kind.
Called the Bhagat Singh Conference, it was held a few days after Singh’s death anniversary on 23 March. Lahore was the hub of his political activities. He had been schooled here, exposed to revolutionary Marxist literature here, had formed his first political party here and had been hanged here too. After his death, his supporters had managed to wrest his and his comrades’ remains from the colonial administration and cremated them on the banks of the Ravi.45 Several of his former comrades wanted to construct a memorial for him in Lahore, but that was not to be. Instead, a memorial was constructed on the other side of the border, in 1968, in a village called Hussainiwalla.
Even though Lahore, Punjab and, in fact, the whole of India showered their love on Bhagat Singh both during his lifetime and after, his legacy in Pakistan became a victim of history’s communalization. Only leaders of the Muslim League or those historical Muslim ‘heroes’ that fit the narrative of the most dominant party of the country were to be celebrated in Pakistan. Roads, buildings and institutions were renamed to honour our new heroes. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Allama Iqbal and Fatima Ali Jinnah continue to be the most popular names of roads and institutions. Slowly and gradually, all traces of the non-Muslim League political leaders were erased.
At the end of the lower Mall, at a place called Gol Bagh, there was a statue of the ‘Lion of Punjab’ Lala Lajpat Rai, with his index finger raised towards his audience. Following the riots of Partition, when statues around the city were being vandalized, this statue was removed from its location and placed in the parking lot of Mayo School of Arts. It eventually found its way to Mall Road in Shimla, India.46
Bhagat Singh fared no better. The annual festival on the occasion of his death anniversary, attended by thousands of people in Lahore and Banga, his home town in district Faisalabad, ended abruptly in 1947.
Similar to what would happen in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s case almost five decades later, Bhagat Singh, along with Rajguru and Sukhdev, was hanged at 7 pm on 23 March in Lahore Central Jail as opposed to the scheduled time in the morning of 24 March.47 Anticipating massive protests, the administration pre-empted any interference by executing them before the appointed hour. The bodies of the three men were then hacked, placed in sacks and, through the rear gate of the jail, driven to the banks of the Sutlej, to a jungle near Ganda Singhwalla village, about 70 kilometres from Lahore.48 Here, while the remains were being burned, the officials were intercepted by protesters from Ferozepur and Lahore, leading them to abandon the half-completed project. The protesters then took the remains back to Lahore, Bhagat Singh’s political home.
Bhagat Singh’s incarceration from 1929 to 1931 had captured the political imagination of the people of India. He became the only other political leader of the pre-Partition anti-colonial struggle who at one point rivalled Gandhi’s popularity.49 He provided an alternative to the Mahatma’s non-violent political struggle. They became symbols of competing political ideologies, representing two distinct means to achieve the same goal—independence. Independence itself meant two different things to them. For Gandhi, Purna Swaraj was a spiritual journey, a self-discovery, leading to self-control and self-mastery. This internal spiritual autonomy was to align with the external political reality. For Bhagat Singh, whose struggle too required immense self-discipline, the Gandhian confluence of spirituality and politics held no significance. Purna Swaraj for him was a socialist revolution, the abolition of class and the disappearance of religion. While in Gandhi’s India, the capitalist would look after the needs of the proletariat in a paternalistic manner,50 in Bhagat Singh’s India, there was to be no capitalist, only a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Even while the younger leadership of the Congress, including Jawaharlal Nehru, was sympathetic to Bhagat Singh—Nehru even visited him in Lahore Central Jail—Gandhi remained vehemently opposed to the young revolutionary.51 His critics argue that Gandhi at that point could have used his good offices with the British to procure clemency for Bhagat Singh and his comrades, but he was too adamant to acknowledge anyone else’s concept of revolution if it did not consort with his.
Eight years after the abrupt end of the Non-Cooperation Movement, the country braced itself for another movement—the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930. Revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad were a fallout of the previous abandoned movement.52 Having thrown themselves into the movement, they had been disappointed by its sudden abandonment. They had argued that in a country where an incident like Jallianwala Bagh could happen, incidents like Chauri Chaura were also bound to happen. Deeply disillusioned by Gandhi’s call to end the movement, both Bhagat Singh and Azad had decided to confront the colonial state through the very violence it espoused.
Bhagat Singh, in particular, became a vocal critic of the Indian National Congress and Gandhi. He had no patience for their oscillation between appeasing the government and opposing it. A committed Marxist, for him, violence was an essential feature of a revolution, thus making him sceptical of Gandhi’s non-violence mantra.
This time as well, despite a nationwide response, the non-cooperation movement did fizzle out, as Gandhi began his talks with Viceroy Irwin. The talks led to the Gandhi–Irwin Pact resulting in the discontinuation of the movement, as the British government agreed to release political activists, except those who had committed acts of violence.53 This it seemed was particularly angled to keep Bhagat Singh and his comrades in jail.
On 8 April 1929, Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt threw two bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly in New Delhi from the visitor’s gallery. They were deliberately thrown in a vacant part of the gallery to avoid harming attendees. Leaflets thrown with the bomb read, ‘It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear.’54
Bhagat Singh was an incredibly well-read revolutionary. At a young age, he had established a deep bond with books and emerged as an exceptional writer. He spent numerous hours studying Marxist literature at the Dwarka Das Library in Lahore, the home of revolutionary literature in the city. His jail notebook contains passages from writers such as Plato, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Trotsky, Marx, Engel
s, Lenin, as well as Rabindranath Tagore and Lala Lajpat Rai. Even on the day of his hanging, he was engaged in reading till a few minutes before his death.55 He understood the important role literature played in political revolutions.
He had extraordinary knowledge of global affairs, particularly revolutionary history. In his writings one finds references to global events, analysed in the local Indian context. Even in the act of throwing bombs in the Assembly, he had taken a leaf from a similar revolutionary act in the French Parliament with the aim of directing the Parliament’s attention towards the poverty of the people. That act too had been accompanied by the one-liner, ‘It needs an explosion to make the deaf hear.’56
Both the bombers courted arrest after the explosion. This was part of the strategy devised by Bhagat Singh. He knew that he could not expect a fair trial from the British, but wanted to use the platform provided by it to raise awareness about their revolutionary agenda. Applying the Marxist interpretation of history, they felt that India was still not ripe for revolution, hence it needed a dramatic act, such as the one committed by them, to raise political consciousness. Their sham of a trial was to offer them the perfect opportunity to do so.
Bhagat Singh was one of the main theoreticians behind the revolutionary Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA). It was under his influence that the party added ‘Socialist’ to its name and socialism to its political agenda. His comprehensive understanding of global revolutionary movements and his deep knowledge of statecraft outshone even that of Chandra Shekhar Azad, his mentor and the founder of the party.57 It was therefore deemed that he would be the perfect candidate to represent the party’s agenda during the trials.
The bombings drew sharp criticism from the nationalist movement. Several leaders of the Congress, including Gandhi and Motilal Nehru, severely condemned the act.58 Bhagat Singh had yet not become the revolutionary folk hero he was to become. Things changed dramatically during their imprisonment.59 In jail, Bhagat Singh along with his comrades began a 116-day hunger strike in what was to become the longest hunger strike of its time. The protesters were force-fed on several occasions, severely damaging their fragile health. On the sixty-third day of the protest, one of their comrades, Jatin Das, passed away. Forcible feeding of milk had damaged his lungs, but he refused to give up his fast even on his deathbed, choosing instead to give up his life in protest.60
In a letter written by Bhagat Singh to the superintendent of Mianwali Jail where he was kept for a little while, he argued that they were political prisoners and should not be treated like common criminals. In addition, he demanded a better diet, no forced labour, books, newspapers, better clothing and toiletries. He also argued that political prisoners be treated as European ‘special class’ prisoners.61 Upon receiving no response, he and his comrades decided to go on a hunger strike.
The colonial state was particularly reluctant to accept them as political prisoners. So far it had cast them as ‘terrorists’, stripping them of political motive. Allowing them to be termed political prisoners would also require the colonial administration to acknowledge their political grievances, thus making it difficult to present them as terrorist demons.
The hunger strike quickly changed public perception in favour of Bhagat Singh and his comrades.62 His parent party, Naujawan Bharat Sabha, which he had formed in 1926 in Lahore, worked tirelessly to garner support in his favour. They organized several meetings and even celebrated an All-India Bhagat Singh-Dutt Day. Jatin Das’s death added fuel to the fire.
Bhagat Singh was also successfully using the trial for propaganda. His political speeches were being reported and consumed by the entire country. Nationalistic fervour in the 1920s was already at fever pitch, with the Rowlatt Act agitation, the Jallianwala Bagh incident, the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience movements, and now Bhagat Singh. He became a national icon. His slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ became a rallying cry across the nation.63 Prominent leaders including Nehru and Jinnah spoke in his favour, yet the British government remained unmoved.
At this time, Gandhi met Lord Irwin, the viceroy of India. There was an expectation that he would intercede on behalf of the prisoners. Jatin Das’s death had pricked the conscience of the nation, yet Gandhi remained quiet, adamant that ‘violent’ tactics were not the correct path to freedom. He completely ignored the fact that through their non-violent hunger strike, these prisoners had adopted an approach Gandhi had often used himself. In this, they were not unlike Gandhi’s satyagrahi.64 Yet Gandhi could not look past their ‘violent’ act. His reluctance to engage with Bhagat Singh and others played into the hands of the British, who could hang them for they had quite unexpectedly found the link to another unresolved case—the Second Lahore Conspiracy Case.
During the Khalistan militancy phase in the 1980s in India’s state of Punjab, Bhagat Singh quite strangely emerged as an icon of the movement. His posters became widely available in Punjab, perhaps to emphasize the point that one man’s revolutionary can be another’s terrorist. One such iconic poster depicted Bhagat Singh holding a pistol, standing behind a tree facing the superintendent’s office, waiting for J.A. Scott to emerge.65
The lathi charge during the Simon Commission protests, in which Lala Lajpat Rai had sustained life-threatening injuries, had been ordered by Scott, superintendent of police.66 Rai held a special place in Bhagat Singh’s life. He had studied at the college Rai had founded. His library had played a crucial role in fomenting his revolutionary ideas. Rai had also been a comrade of Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary uncle, Ajit Singh, and the two had founded the Bharat Mata Society.67 He also represented a breed of Congress leaders whom Bhagat Singh could trust. They were seen as revolutionaries, and not ‘appeasers’ as Bhagat Singh labelled other Congress leaders.
Despite holding Lala Lajpat Rai in high respect, Bhagat Singh and his party also had major political differences with him and criticized him on several occasions. They were particularly critical of Rai’s communalization of the national struggle. Even so, they saw Rai’s death as a blow to the pride of Indians. A sense of despair had descended on the political landscape of the country. Not even one of the senior-most national leaders had been spared.68
Bhagat Singh and his comrades in the HSRA wanted to avenge Lala Lajpat Rai’s death. On 17 December 1928, all of them took their positions, waiting for Scott to leave his office. Bhagat Singh and Rajguru had been given the responsibility of shooting Scott. They both stood behind a neem tree facing the office, waiting for their target.
That neem tree still stands tall, just behind the gate of Islamia College. Graffiti of the IJT is painted in a calligraphic style on the wall. Almost nine decades after Bhagat Singh, this college, that was once the DAV College, is still home to vibrant student politics. One of the agendas of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha was to politicize students and form associations with other student bodies. They were particularly successful in Lahore. So perturbed was the colonial government at the revolutionary politics at DAV College that the governor of Punjab threatened this college and others with grave consequences if things did not change.69
When I visited the site of the incident, I noticed how, under the shade of the tree, on the footpath facing the superintendent’s office, clerks were filling up forms for petitioners heading into these offices. With their years of experience, they knew well enough which documents needed to be forged and how to answer particular questions. The road in front of the office was blocked with barbed wire and cement. Armed police officials manned the tall walls and entrances into the office, as a sea of people rushed in and out with different petitions. Traffic was limited to only one road, where everyone was honking incessantly.
It was not Scott but his assistant superintendent of Police, J.P. Saunders, who exited the building. A signal was given to Rajguru and Bhagat Singh, but before Bhagat Singh realized this was not their man, Rajguru had already fired. Bhagat Singh followed suit, pumping three or four bullets into his body. They tried escaping but were chased by t
he head inspector, Chanan Singh, who was shot dead by Chandra Shekhar Azad.70
Bhagat Singh and his comrades disappeared into DAV College, where the student body was sympathetic to their ideology. The colonial state was aware of this and clamped down heavily on students’ groups. Several students were detained for questioning, but in vain. While the Indian National Congress officially distanced itself from the shooting, it spoke out in support of these students being harassed by the state.71
There was countrywide condemnation of the act. Even People, a weekly magazine started by Lala Lajpat Rai in Lahore, criticized it.72 Gandhi compared the attack to the murder of the Hindu publisher Rajpal in Lahore at the hands of Ilm-uddin.73 Bhagat Singh and his comrades had ‘avenged’ their country, but had failed to win its support. Something was required to stir its political consciousness, which came in the form of the plan to throw the bombs at the Central Legislative Assembly in New Delhi on 8 April 1929.
During the course of investigating the bombing, police found evidence of Saunders’s murder. A special tribunal heard the case and, on 7 October 1930, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were sentenced to death. Bhagat Singh had already earned nationwide fame by now. His death would turn him into a folk legend. Songs were written about him, legends were crafted about his valour in a vein similar to other Punjabi folk legends, like Dullah Bhatti, Heer-Ranjha and Bulleh Shah.74 His death anniversary became an annual festival, just as the death anniversary of a Sufi saint is celebrated, for that is the day he is supposed to become one with his maker, his beloved. Bhagat Singh came to be revered not just in Punjab but also the whole country.
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