Lala Lajpat Rai

Early life and public work

Lala Lajpat Rai was born in 1865 in Dhudike, in Punjab, and trained as a lawyer. He became active in the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement, and in public and social work in Punjab, including efforts in education and famine relief. He helped found institutions such as the Punjab National Bank and Lakshmi Insurance Company, and was associated with the founding or early development of several educational bodies, reflecting a broader emphasis among his generation of nationalists on constructive institution-building alongside political activity.

Political career

Lajpat Rai joined the Indian National Congress and became associated with its assertive, or "extremist," wing alongside Bal Gangadhar Tilak of Maharashtra and Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal — the three collectively known as "Lal-Bal-Pal," who argued for more direct and confrontational methods against colonial rule than the moderate, petition-based approach of earlier Congress leadership. He was prominent in agitation against the 1905 partition of Bengal and in the broader Swadeshi movement. In 1907 he was deported without trial to Mandalay in Burma for several months under emergency powers, in response to unrest in Punjab, before being released. He later travelled and lectured in the United States and Japan, and wrote extensively, including on Indian nationalism and social reform; he was for a period associated with the Home Rule movement led by Annie Besant and Tilak. He served as president of the Indian National Congress in 1920, at its special Calcutta session called to debate Gandhi's non-cooperation programme.

Death

In October 1928, Lajpat Rai led a protest march in Lahore against the all-British Simon Commission, which had arrived in India without any Indian members to review constitutional reform, under the slogan "Simon Go Back." Police under the direction of Superintendent James A. Scott baton-charged the demonstrators; Lajpat Rai was struck and injured. He died several weeks later, on 17 November 1928; while the precise medical relationship between the injuries and his death has been a subject of some historical discussion, his death was widely attributed at the time to the lathi charge and was treated by nationalist opinion as a killing by the colonial police. His death is commonly cited as a motivating factor behind the assassination of British police officer John Saunders in Lahore in December 1928 by revolutionaries including Bhagat Singh, who stated they intended to target Scott in retaliation for Lajpat Rai's death but killed Saunders in mistaken identity.