Bhagat Singh was born to Kishan Singh and Vidya Vati at Banga in the
Lyallpur district of the West Punjab in 1907 (exact date of birth is not
known).
Kishan Singh was the eldest of the three sons of Arjan Singh and Jai
Kaur, the two others being Ajit Singh and Swaran Singh . The former had
been deported to Mandalay along with Lala Lajpat Rai under the infamous
Regulation III of 1818 on the charge of seditious activities caused by
the iniquitous Colonisation Bill of 1908.
Bhagat Singh was the second of the five
children (four sons and a daughter ) of Kishan Singh, the others bing
Jagat Singh ( died young ), Amar Kaur, Kulbir Singh, Kultar Singh and
Rajinder
Singh. They were a family of Sikh Jat peasant proprietors, known in
the Ilaqa for their self-sacrificing nature. They associated themselves
with all reform movements, Arya Samaj and Sing Sabha alike.
On completion of his primary education at the village school in
Banga, Bhagat Singh was sent to the D.A.V. High school, and then to the
D.A.V. College at Lahore. Here he came under the influence of two
teachers, Bhai Parmanand and Jai Chand Vidyalankar, two veteran
nationalists, who left their impress on the plastic mind of Bhagat
Singh. He became the leader of the student community and founded the
college students union. He even joined the Indian National Congress but,
finding it supine and ineffective, left it.
The execution of the Ghadarite Kartar Singh Saraba in 1915, the
Rowlatt Act and the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy of 1919 made Lahore a
storm-centre of agitation. Bhagat Singh responded to the
non-cooperation call of Gandhi, left the D.A.V. College and later
joined the National College founded by Lala Lajpat Rai, from where he
graduated in 1923.
From 1923 to the time of his execution in 1931, Bhagat Singh
dedicated himself to the liberation of his motherland. In 1923 he
associated himself with the Akalis and Babbar Akalis, who had organized
Morcha at Guru Ka Bagh. The same year he joined the Hindustan Socialist
Republican Association and was very soon elected as the general
secretary of its central committee. He was entrusted with the task of
co-ordinating the inter-provincial activities of the Association.
In 1925 he founded the Nav Jawan Bharat Sabha at Lahore to inculcate a
spirit of revolution among the youth. He came in touch with other
revolutionaries like Sukhdev, Yashpal, Bhagwati
Charan, Chandra Shekhar Azad, B.K. Datt, Surindra Nath Pandaya,
Jatindra Nath Das and others, who were also working among the youth. Das
taught how to make crude bombs.
In 1926 Bhagat Singh planned with Kundan Lal and Azad to rescue the
prisoners of the Kakori Case, but the plan fell through. On the Dussehra
Day of 1926, a bomb exploded in Lahore. Bhagat Singh was arrested and
prosecuted, for want of sufficient evidence he was discharged. In 1928
the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association decided to open a network
of branches in the Punjab under the leadership of Bhagat Singh.
When the all-white Simon Commission landed in Bombay on 3 February
1928, the Congress gave a call of black flag demonstration against it. A
mammoth procession led by Lala Lajpat Rai greeted it with black flags
at the time of its arrival at Lahore. It was lathicharged by the police
and Lala too was not spared. It was too outrageous an insult to be left
unavenged. The Lala succumbed to the injury a few months later.
Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Azad decided to kill Mr. Scott, believed to
be responsible for the lathi blows given to the revered Lala. Taking
him for Scott, they shot at Saunders, a police head constable, on 17
December 1928 and killed him. Bhagat Singh escaped from Lahore and came
to Calcutta where he opened a branch of his party.
The party now entrusted Bhagat Singh and B.K. Datt to throw a bomb in
the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi in order to demonstrate to
the alien rulers the utter disgust and disaffection of the Indians
against their autocratic rule. On April 8, 1929 they threw a bomb when
the Central Assembly was in session, and later offered themselves for
arrest shouting & Inquilab Zindabad & (Long Live Revolution).
Bhagat Singh and B.K. Datt were arrested, and later Bhagat Singh,
Rajguru and Sukhdev were tried, and hanged in Lahore Central Jail on 23
March 1931 at about 7.30 in the evening. Their corpses were not handed
over to their relatives but were cremated by the police at the dead of
night on the banks of the river Satlej, near Ferozepur.
Justly remembered as & Shahid-I-azam & by his grateful
countrymen for making the supreme sacrifice, Bhagat Singh infused life
into the youth and became their hero. It & has increased our
power for winning freedom for which Bhagat Singh and his comrades
have died”, said Mahatma Gandhi. “Their magnificent courage and
sacrifice has been an inspiration to the youth of India”, said Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru, the then President of the Indian National Congress, in
his tribute. They died so that India may live.
An ardent nationalist and freedom-loving patriot, Bhagat Singh was,
however, not an anarchist. “It is my firm belief,” he said, “that the
country will not profit by bombs and pistols-mere throwing of bombs is
not only futile but it is often harmful, although it may be permissible
in certain circumstances”. He justified the use of force only when “it
is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause&.
Besides being a nationalist to his core, Bhagat Singh was a socialist
and a republican. “Labour is the real sustainer of society. The
sovereignty of the people is the ultimate destiny of workers. For these
ideals and for this faith we shall welcome any suffering to which we may
be condemned”. This brings out Bhagat Singh not as a mere terrorist,
which his prosecutors laboured to make out. He was a socialist, a
democrat- all in one.
An example of Bhagat Singh’s shrewdness and resourcefulness can be
given from an episode in the Contributor’s life. Bhagat Singh was in
jail and the Contributor (Prithvi Singh Azad) had gone underground in
Gujarat, with a big price on his head announced by the British rulers.
The police and the C.I.D. tried to fish out some information about Azad
from Bhagat Singh, and Bhagat Singh wanted the same from them. In this
battle of wits, Bhagat Singh gathered that Azad was in Gujarat.
Through the help of Bhai Parmanand and Dhanwantri, Azad was traced
‘somewhere’ in Gujarat, and a meeting was also arranged between Prithvi
Singh and Dhanwantri and Chandra Shekhar in a park in Lucknow where
later Chandra Shekhar Azad fell a martyr to police bullets. An automatic
pistol was presented to Prithvi Singh and he
was asked to proceed to Russia on his own resources to learn the staging of a Bolshevik type of revolution in India.
It was Bhagat Singh’s conviction that India could be liberated from
slavery of the British by means of a sort of Bolshevik Revolution in
India. Bhagat Singh had read communist literature, particularly Marx’s
‘Das Capital’ and also the ‘Communist Manifesto’.
Bhagat Singh was the first Indian revolutionary to start the slogan
of Inquilab Zindabad, which later became the war cry of Indian
Independence struggle.
Bhagat Singh edited the Urdu paper Kirti from Amristar. He also
edited the Akali at Amristar. He was a good journalist and for some time
contributed to the Arjun (Delhi) and Pratap (Kanpur) under the
pseudonym of ‘Balwant Singh’.
