Bhagat Singh Revisited: Historiography, Biography and Ideology of the Great Martyr

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Why Bhagat Singh has emerged as the greatest icon of the Indian youth? Was it for his martyrdom or some ideology? For some years there has been a concerted effort to denigrate his martyrdom and to project him as an ideologue. What is the true legacy of Bhagat Singh? Bhagat Singh Revisited: Historiography, Biography and Ideology of the Great Martyr traces the historiography of this distortion. It is the result of almost five years of meticulous research with care taken to consult almost every available source - archival, contemporary memoirs, newspapers and others. It establishes that Bhagat Singh did not meet martyrdom accidently rather invited it in a calculated manner and failed all the efforts to save his life. He made supreme sacrifice to awaken the masses for the freedom of the motherland. He was a patriot par excellence. Freedom of the motherland came to him first and ideology later. This book, for the first time, examines all the writings attributed to Bhagat Singh in terms of their authorship, date of writing, and publication history. For the last eighty years Mahatma Gandhi has been blamed for not having tried to save his life. This historical distortion has been successfully demolished here. Even the chronology of Bhagat Singh's short of 23 years has been reconstructed in the light of new evidence. The book also traces out how Bhagat Singh turned into one of the most popular figures of his time from being just an underground revolutionary up to the day he threw a bomb in the Central Assembly on 8 April 1929. The readers will find this book full of facts, references and insights.

Dr. Chander Pal Singh (b. 1972) is a gold-medalist in M.A (Modern Indian History); did his Ph. D. on national education movement as a recipient of Junior and Senior Research Fellowships from U.G.C., which is going to be published shortly; worked for three years as Research Associate on a special project of the I.C.H.R. entitled Documentation of British Census Policy 1870 1941; contributed papers in journals and seminars; starting as L.N.J. Bhilwara Fellow, he is currently engaged in full time research at Centre for Policy Studies, New Delhi, on British policy behind the constitutional reform process in India leading to the present Constitution.

Armed revolutionaries were a minor but conspicuous stream in the struggle for Indian independence. They were organized into small bands of heroic and inspired young men who were convinced that British rule over India was established through sword and it could be removed through sword only. To achieve this purpose, an armed uprising was considered inevitable for which people could be motivated only through self-sacrifice and by terrorizing the British officials. It goes to the credit of the revolutionaries that unlike other streams, the British failed to entice them into the trap of the constitutional development process which was designed to prolong the foreign rule in India by continuously creating new divisions in the Indian society. Though their fight against the British might was very unequal, yet the revolutionaries left indelible mark on the hearts of their fellow countrymen with their bravery and sacrifice.

Among the hundreds of the revolutionary martyrs whom a grateful nation cannot afford to forget, the names of a few are itched stronger in the public memory. They include, among others, Chapekar brothers-Damodar and Balkrishna, Khudiram Bose, Madan Lal Dhingra, Prafulla Chaki, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Ramprasad Bismil, Ashfaq Ullah Khan, Jatin Das, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru and Surya Sen. Even in this elite gathering, one name that stands out and has become synonymous with the highest ideals of patriotism and martyrdom is Bhagat Singh. Seventy nine years after his martyrdom, Bhagat Singh still remains a symbol of courage, valour and supreme sacrifice for the nation. He is one of the most popular figures of the struggle for Indian independence, an object of pride for countless millions, and above all, a national icon.

Though Bhagat Singh is known for participating in the killing of the police officer Saunders and bomb explosions in the Central Assembly, his most rewarding exploits were related not to his life as an underground revolutionary, but to his two years stay in jail. While other martyrs earned fame for their heroic acts outside the jail, Bhagat Singh's iconic stature and legend is the product of his jail life. He courted arrest in the Central Assembly with a definite purpose and plan. Every act of his, during his trial and after the conviction, was aimed towards popularizing the ideals and objectives of the revolutionary party, and to electrify the nation with his sufferings and sacrifice. Under his leadership, the revolutionary party used the court proceedings to popularize their cause and struggle to such an extent that Government became nervous and was forced to take legally questionable steps to hasten the trial, including the trial in absence. Thus Bhagat Singh exposed the reality of the oft-repeated British boast of their 'rule of law'. In the course of his struggle in jail, including an epic 113 days long hunger strike, Bhagat Singh received sympathy and love from all the classes, some of whom in the past had been skeptical of identifying with the revolutionary cause and methods. He thus singlehandedly changed the image of revolutionaries from misguided patriots to popular heroes and gave the revolutionary movement a human face. He invited and planned his martyrdom and embraced it at the height of his popularity to cause the maximum impact. His martyrdom unleashed powerful waves of patriotic sentiment in all corners of India. No Indian revolutionary or martyr, before or after Bhagat Singh, was able to achieve all this.

It all began in February 2006. While roaming in the World Book Fair held at Delhi, I came across in the Hindi section, a bookstall from Lucknow drenched in the colour of Bhagat Singh. The banners, posters, stickers, songs and even the markings on the shirts of the workers all bore the stamp of Bhagat Singh. I was thrilled. Since my childhood Bhagat Singh as a great patriot and martyr, had been my hero. I went inside, purchased several small pamphlets and a bulky book in Hindi titled, Bhagat Singh Aur Unke Sathion Ke Sampoorn Uplabdh Dastavej (Complete Available Documents of Bhagat Singh and His Comrades), edited by Satyam and published by the Rahul Foundation of Lucknow. It had been published just a month back, in January 2006. Reaching home, I impatiently began scanning its pages and was struck by an eighteen pages long Introduction penned by the Editor.

I was shocked to discover that the Editor, ignoring Bhagat Singh's ardent patriotism, his quest for the freedom of the motherland and therefore inviting his own martyrdom in a planned manner, had tried to paint him only as a Marxist ideologue. The Editor's disdain for Bhagat Singh's iconic image as 'The Great Martyr' was too obvious. He could barely hide his anguish that, barring a few diehard Left activists, the vast mass of educated Indians recognized Bhagat Singh as a great martyr only. The Editor felt that Bhagat Singh's ideology, more than his martyrdom was relevant to our times, when all the parliamentary parties and pseudo-leftists had been exposed. Writing in the year 2006, he felt convinced that the world had entered a decisive phase of its war against the demonic imperialist-capitalist forces. He was eager to use Bhagat Singh as a beacon light in this decisive war. He gave long quotations attributed to Bhagat Singh to convince readers that the war against imperialist-capitalist forces, begun by Bhagat Singh was continuing. He exhorted his readers to build a new Communist Party in the true Leninist mould as well as to reinvent the class character of Gandhi and his Congress. Writing this in 2006, the poor Editor could hardly have imagined that the eminent Prof. Bipin Chandra, whose authority he had used again and again to support his line of argument, would in the year 2010 announce that in his next work he would be presenting Bhagat Singh, had he chosen to avoid the gallows, as a would-be 'Gandhian Marxist' (a contradiction in itself). The Editor also rued the untimely martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, for in his view, had Bhagat Singh managed to escape the gallows, he would have built a Communist Party, rooted in his own brand of Marxism, which was closer to Mao Tse Tung and Ho Chi Minh. This, the Editor believed, would have given a new turn to the history of not only the Communist movement but of India as a whole.

This interpretation of the great martyr kindled in me a desire to have a look into the recent Marxist writings on Bhagat Singh. I found that Satyam was only articulating the general Marxist position on Bhagat Singh. Each fragment of the Communist movement in India, whether parliamentary parties like CPI, CPM or those who do not believe in the parliamentary democracy like the Maoists, is keen to present Bhagat Singh in its own light, and each is desperate to use Bhagat Singh to reach the youth for whom Bhagat Singh is an icon. They are fully conscious of Bhagat Singh's vast popularity among the Indian masses in general and the youth in particular.