By Anirban Bhattacharya
It was a stormy night on March 22, 1931, as government officials paced restlessly about the hushed corridors of Lahore central jail. It was a silent night. An unnatural stillness had begun to creep in the night along with a shortness of breath, as everyone waited to see how the upcoming events would unfold. Official writs had been passed on with brisk efficiency, pleas had been filed and rejected, and a petition challenging the powers of the tribunal, specially set up for the occasion, was summarily dismissed. The British Raj would not be deniedit would deal out its ‘ideal’ of justice to the ‘evildoers’ who had challenged its right, to those who had denied it.
Standing out from others
Nonetheless, Bhagat Singh, the man at the centre of this drama, was oddly calm. Earlier, he had contemptuously rejected advice from a team consisting of Stead, Barker, Roberts, Hardinge, and Chopra to seek pardon from the British government as unsolicited and unwanted. Now, as morning dawned on the 23rd, a sense of renewed urgency gripped the jail as a decision was taken to move the executions a day forward. A disturbed and grief-stricken jail warden, Chhattar Singh, pleaded with Bhagat Singh to recite the name of God, for a boon of mercy perchance. However, the twenty-three-year-old was too engrossed in his book on Vladimir Ilyich Ulanov to listen. He was just meeting Lenin, you see, for the first time. Understandably, to the young socialist revolutionary meeting a figure from his legends, death could wait a few moments.
Precious little remains to tell about his final moments but they are among the most important, for they show his defiance to the bitter end and his love for his homeland. As the three prisoners, compatriots in arms,Sukhdev Thapar, Shivram Rajguru and Bhagat Singhexited their cells, they shouted: “inquilab zindabad: long live the revolution. Their screams were heard by Pindi Dass Sodhi, district secretary, Congress, even as other prisoners joined in the chant.
An end of a legend
A few words will suffice to tell what little remains. Before being led to the noose, Bhagat Singh is said to have asked to hug Sukhdev and Rajguru, for they had been brothers for a long time. See how Indian freedom fighters kiss deathwith a last parting shot and a smile on his lips, Bhagat Singh is revealed to have died first, swiftly followed by Rajguru and Sukhdev. Thus, a life ended in the waters of the Sutlej.
However, what did not end was the memory of him. Till date, Bhagat Singh remains the most iconic revolutionary of our time and our country, and perhaps the most beloved universally. Why would a man who refused to wear a mask over his face at the gallows, a man who was guilty of shooting the wrong man (British police superintendent James Scott who ordered the lathi-charge that killed Lala Lajpat Rai was the target not John Saunders who was still on probation) inspire such fanatical loyalty and outpouring of love among a country divided? It was a country that had no sense of itself, a country at war with its past and present, a country as divided on the issue of its potential liberty as it were on how to achieve it.
Unparalleled respect for unwavering heroism
It is because he had everything to lose and he did it all anyway. In another time in another life, Bhagat Singh would have been an ideal son, studying diligently for his exams, giving good-natured grief to his parents and working at a steady job as a government employee, perhaps even the vaunted ICS. He could have walked away from that path and chosen a different future for himself. Nevertheless, he chose to walk the hardest oneone he was destined to lose. He did all of this for an ideal: the freedom to forge his own destiny. Nothing less than freedom would do for him (Swaraj is my birthright), for his people and for his country. Bhagat Singh had seen the bitter rewards that two hundred years of British occupation had thrown up. His people’s history and culture were trampled into the dirt as they were brutally exploited and impoverished while their wealth was funnelled offshores for their foreign masters to enjoy. Yet, in their arrogance, the British brought science and education to India. That just opened up Bhagat’s world to possibilities of a life beyond this entrenched servitude: A life where he could be more and a future where his country would be more.