 came to Bhagat Singh.”
Bhagat Singh had enlisted the help of Shivaram Rajguru, Sukhdev, and Chandrasekhar Azad. They fled the crime scene. To escape capture, Bhagat Singh cropped his hair and shaved his beard. He put on a fedora: and so came into being the iconography of a political rebel.
The following year, Bhagat Singh came up with the yet more dramatic idea of exploding a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly, but doing so in a manner that would not take the life of anyone. It has been argued, quite rightly, that Bhagat Singh and his comrades desired that they should be taken captive. The idea was that the British would launch a prosecution, and that Bhagat Singh would find a stage to air publicly his grievances, and that of a nation, against British colonialism.
Bhagat Singh would have known that, with his action, he would be walking into the jaws of death. I would like to believe, however, that Bhagat Singh had had enough of killing. Saunders may have been the instrument of colonial rule, and by that logic was as guilty as Scott; nevertheless, the wrong man had been killed. There may have been a Gandhi in that Bhagat Singh who threw a bomb with the express intention of not killing anyone.
Bhagat Singh must have learned something about how publicity can act as the oxygen of a nationalist movement; he doubtless also understood, from his study of nationalism, how Gandhi, Tilak, and many others had mastered the courtroom and turned that quintessential British space against the British themselves. But there is something more profound at stake here: If violence is inescapably present to the practitioner of nonviolence at every turn, we should also think of the nonviolence within some forms of violence that signals the reverence for life.
Bhagat Singh got his wish: though the many twists and turns in the story are interesting enough, they need not detain us, and it suffices to say that he went on trial for both the Assembly bombing and, later, the Saunders murder case. Sukhdev, Rajguru, and Bhagat Singh were sentenced to death. I have said that Nehru thought he had seen everything; but he had not, since, for a time, the popularity of Bhagat Singh appeared to exceed the popularity of Gandhi. He found the popularity of Bhagat Singh “amazing”.
Bhagat Singh and his comrades went to the gallows, and the country went into mourning.
With Bhagat Singh’s death, the phenomenon of Bhagat Singh found a new, extended, and more complicated lease of life. There are many troubling aspects to the appropriation of his legacy, none more so than the attempt by Hindu nationalists to claim him as their own. Bhagat Singh was an atheist; he was also a committed communist; and, for someone his age, well-read in the extreme. I suspect that he also understood well the difference between a nationalist and a patriot. We can be certain of one thing. He was everything that the Hindu nationalists of today are not.
First published on September 28 at ABP News Network under the same title, here.
Also published in Hindi as: भगत सिंह की कहानी एक अद्भुत घटना है, online: https://www.abplive.com/blog/blog-the-phenomenon-of-bhagat-singh-1210440