Had Bhagat Singh lived (it was his 100th birthday last week) and his ideals translated into reality there would perhaps be no need for a communal partition of India in 1947. I guess he would have put his enormous might and that of his selfless comrades into securing what he fought and died for – his vision best depicted in the name of his party, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.

In the absence of anything worthwhile happening in Delhi to remember the 23-year-old martyr who was hanged with his young colleagues Sukhdev and Rajguru on March 23, 1931, in the Lahore jail, I drove on Sept 28, his birthday, through a strange, almost surreal rainstorm for the book release of Kuldip Nayar’s reheated account of the free-spirited Indian. It was worth the effort. As I reached Mr Nayar was winding up. His last comments went something like this: “Bhagat Singh’s message is still relevant. It has to be imparted to the youth of India. (Why not Pakistan, Bangladesh too, I wondered) The objective conditions that Bhagat Singh fought against have not changed much in the country. There are still 70 per cent Indians who live on their own, uncared for by the state, many of them illiterate, others starving and impoverished.”

Let me tell you why I think Bhagat Singh would have prevented the partition and why only he and not anyone else, be it Jinnah, Gandhi or Nehru, was equipped to do that. To begin with Bhagat Singh kept himself studiously aloof from religion and obscurantism. In his rejoinder to colleagues who were religious and were surprised by his rejection of even a single religious prayer in the lonely death cell, Bhagat Singh wrote a testament of amazing clarity and insight. Kuldip Nayar’s book “Without Fear” gives a glimpse of Bhagat Singh’s thinking of why the young revolutionary chose to be an atheist.

“I am going to sacrifice my life for a cause. What more consolation can there be?” Bhagat Singh wrote in Why I am an atheist. “A God-believing Hindu may expect to be reborn; a Muslim or a Christian might dream of the luxuries he hopes to enjoy in paradise as a reward for his sufferings and sacrifices. What hope should I entertain? I know it will be the end when the rope is tightened around my neck and the rafters moved from under my feet. To use more precise religious terminology – it will be my moment of utter annihilation. My soul will come to nothing. If I have the courage to think of the matter in the light of a “reward”, I see a short life of struggle with no such magnificent end as itself my “reward”. That is all…With no selfish motive or desire to be awarded here or hereafter, quite disinterestedly have I devoted my life to the cause of independence; because I could not do otherwise.”

Bhagat Singh was 10 years old when the Bolshevik Revolution erupted in Russia. He had another 11 years to read, learn, imbibe and practise the revolutionary ideals. This was followed by a long endgame that gave him another two years to hone his intellectual calibre before the execution. A sham trial stopped the flow of his level-headed and clearly argued ideas. However, it was only after 1947 that Bhagat Singh’s jail writings came to light. Among the thinkers whose ideas he held dear were Marx, Lenin, Victor Hugo and Bertrand Russell. In fact his unflinching atheism could only have come as an approval of Russell’s discussion on atheism and agnosticism. It is true that Russell wavered between calling himself an agnostic and describing himself as an atheist. He evidently did not attach too much importance to this distinction, but he made it clear that if he was to be classified as an agnostic, it would have to be in a sense in which an agnostic and an atheist are “for practical purposes, at one.” Bhagat Singh was less flexible, but would have smiled at Russell’s famous remark: “O God, if there is a God, bless my soul, if there is a soul.”

Lala Rajpat Rai, the radical if obscurantist Congress leader from the Punjab, was among the early advocates of the two-nation theory for Hindus and Muslims. Bhagat Singh was naturally opposed to the idea. And yet, when Rajpat Rai was fatally wounded in a police assault on a rally against the Simon Commission, Bhagat Singh vowed revenge. He allowed himself to be hanged for the murder of a British police officer in retribution for the Lala’s death. Bhagat Singh was even more critical of the Gandhi-Nehru duo when it came to the strategy to win freedom for India’s people, not just a transfer of power from one ruling elite to another.

Bhagat Singh admitted to the shortcomings of what he himself described as terrorist methods of seeking India’s freedom, but he believed it was a necessary passing phase. “The revolutionaries already see the advent of the revolution in the restlessness of youth, in its desire to break free from mental bondage and religious superstitions that hold them. As the youth will get more and more saturated with the psychology of revolution, it will come to have clearer realisation of national bondage and growing, intense, unquenchable thirst for freedom. It will grow, this feeling of bondage, this insatiable desire for freedom, till, in their righteous anger, the infuriated youth will kill the oppressors. Thus has terrorism been born in the country. It is a phase, a necessary phase, an inevitable phase of the revolution.

Terrorism is not the complete revolution and the revolution is not complete without terrorism. This thesis can be supported by an analysis of any and every revolution in history.”

Bhagat Singh saw Congress sessions as boring and pointless. He left one such meeting to watch the movie “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. The film about America’s incipient civil rights struggle allowed him some moments with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, whom he admired greatly.

Of Gandhi’s passive resistance he was unsparing. He recalled how after his first experience with the Ahmedabad labourers in 1920 Gandhi had declared: “We must not tamper with the labourers. It is dangerous to make political use of the factory proletariat. Since then, they never dared to approach (the Congress). There remains the peasantry. The Bardoli resolution of 1922 clearly defines the horror the leaders felt when they saw the gigantic peasant class rising to shake off not only the domination of the alien rulers but also the yolk of the (Indian) landlords. It is there that our leaders prefer surrender to the British than to the peasantry. Leave alone Pandit Jawaharlal, can you point out any leader who made an effort to organise the peasants or the labourers? No, they will not run the risk…That is why I say they never meant a complete revolution. Through economic and administrative pressure they hoped to get a few more reforms, a few more concessions for the Indian capitalists. That is why I say that this movement is doomed to die, may be after some sort of a compromise, or even without.”

Suppose Bhagat Singh were alive last week and allowed himself the luxury of watching the India-Australia cricket match in Bangalore match on TV. How would he have responded to an ad in between in which a young man astride a motorcycle tears up his visa to the United States because he wants to use his talent as a qualified engineer to build Indian skyscrapers? Patriotism yes. But wait for the punch line, which says: He who drives Hero Honda will drive India.

Bhagat Singh would be reminded of Allama Iqbal’s barb over a similar situation during the colonial era:

Inteha is ki hae ke akhir kharidein kab talak
Chatrian, roomal, muffler, pairahan Jaapaan se
Apni ghaflat ki agar haalat yehi qaim rahi
Aeinge ghussal Kabul se kafan Jaapaan se

(It will never be enough, so how long should we buy Umbrellas, scarves, even clothes from Japan?
If our indifference to this problem remains firmly rooted or unresolved then experts would be brought from Kabul to bathe our dead and the shrouds would be shipped from Japan).

Bhagat Singh had a sense of irony, and so he would perhaps have managed to smile at the India Shining ad. My fear is that the ruling parties would mistake the sardonic smile for approval.


Email: jawednaqvi@gmail.com