Bhagat Singh

Early radicalisation

Bhagat Singh was born into a Punjabi Sikh Jat family with a background of political activism: his father Kishan Singh and uncle Ajit Singh had both been active in agrarian and anti-colonial agitation in Punjab, and Ajit Singh had been exiled for organising against a punitive land-revenue and irrigation policy in the 1900s. Bhagat Singh briefly attended the National College in Lahore, founded by nationalist educators as an alternative to government-affiliated institutions, where he came under the influence of teachers sympathetic to revolutionary politics. He read widely in European political thought, including the writings of Bakunin, Marx and Lenin, and moved away from the family's Sikh religious practice toward an avowed atheism and socialism that he set out explicitly in his later prison writings, arguing that revolutionary change required a scientific, class-based analysis of colonial exploitation rather than religious or purely nationalist appeals. In 1926 he helped found the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, a youth organisation in Punjab oriented toward secular, radical nationalism, and subsequently joined the Hindustan Republican Association, an underground revolutionary organisation that he and others, including Chandrashekhar Azad, reconstituted in 1928 as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), with an explicitly socialist programme alongside its commitment to armed revolutionary action against British rule. He also worked for a period as a journalist and editor for Punjabi- and Urdu-language nationalist periodicals, including the Kirti Kisan Party's journal Kirti, writing under pseudonyms.

Lala Lajpat Rai's death and the Saunders killing

In October 1928, the veteran nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai was seriously injured during a lathi charge by police while leading a protest in Lahore against the all-British Simon Commission, and died some weeks later; his death was widely, though not universally, attributed to injuries from the charge. Bhagat Singh and fellow HSRA members Rajguru, Sukhdev and Chandrashekhar Azad planned to kill the police officer they held responsible, Superintendent James Scott, in retaliation. On 17 December 1928 they instead shot and killed Assistant Superintendent John Saunders, having mistaken him for Scott. Bhagat Singh evaded capture by fleeing Lahore in disguise.

The Assembly bombing and trial

On 8 April 1929, Bhagat Singh and fellow HSRA member Batukeshwar Dutt threw two low-intensity bombs, designed not to cause serious injury, into the chamber of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi during a session, in protest against the Public Safety Bill and Trade Disputes Bill then before it, shouting slogans including "Inquilab Zindabad" (Long Live the Revolution) and scattering leaflets explaining the act, one of which argued that "it takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear." Rather than attempt to escape, the two allowed themselves to be arrested, intending the trial to serve as a political platform from which to publicise the HSRA's aims, and both used the courtroom proceedings that followed to deliver political statements rather than mount a conventional defence. Bhagat Singh was subsequently tried separately for the Saunders killing in what became known as the Lahore Conspiracy Case, alongside Sukhdev, Rajguru and other HSRA members; the colonial government, frustrated by delays and by the accused's use of the courtroom for propaganda, eventually pushed through a special ordinance permitting the tribunal to proceed without the accused present and to reach a verdict without a full jury process, a step later criticised as a departure from ordinary legal procedure. While the case proceeded, Bhagat Singh and fellow prisoners undertook a lengthy hunger strike in jail, beginning in mid-1929, demanding better food, reading materials, and recognition of political prisoners' distinct status from ordinary criminal convicts; the strike, which included attempts by jail authorities to force-feed participants, drew wide public attention and contributed to his growing public profile, and one of the strikers, Jatindranath Das, died in September 1929 after more than sixty days without food, his funeral in Lahore and subsequent procession through Calcutta drawing large public mourning.

Execution

Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were convicted and sentenced to death in the Lahore Conspiracy Case. Appeals for clemency were made by various parties, including some Congress leaders, but the government proceeded with the executions, which took place at Lahore Central Jail on 23 March 1931, a day ahead of the officially scheduled date. Their bodies were reportedly cremated secretly by authorities near Ferozepur, on the bank of the Sutlej, at a site later commemorated as Hussainiwala. The timing of the executions, which came shortly after the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931, has been a subject of continuing historical and political debate, with some contemporaries and later commentators criticising Gandhi and the Congress leadership for not pressing harder for commutation, while others note the limits of Gandhi's practical leverage over a decision the colonial government had already made; Bhagat Singh's own political outlook, meanwhile, differed sharply from Gandhi's, favouring organised revolutionary action and explicit socialism over non-violent mass mobilisation, a divergence that continues to inform debate over the relative contribution of different strands of the independence movement.