Posted on 29th June, 2024 (GMT 16:20 hrs)
This post is dedicated to all those undefeated Indian revolutionaries, whose sacrifice we have betrayed in broad daylight…
What if Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh (1907-1931) was alive today, witnessing all that has been happening in India right now? How would he have felt?
Those of us who have studied his ideas for long, the answer to these questions is somewhat obvious. I won’t rely too much on the films made on him, only with the exception of The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002), which portrays his ideological stand somewhat accurately. Rang De Basanti (2006) was overall a good attempt, but it failed to comprehensively sum up Singh’s thoughts, since that was not the film’s aim in the first place.
Coming to talk of Bhagat Singh conjures up a series of imageries: maybe that of a gun-toting romantic revolutionist sporting a Sikh turban and an angry young man kind of vibe. This representation is thoroughly misconstrued and appropriated. The right way to view Bhagat Singh must come to the conclusion of him being an atheist and a scientific socialist with anarchist leanings, which are often ignored. Moreover, he vouched for non-violence as a policy, and never as a creed. He never was a blood-thirsty terrorist, even if he is portrayed like that in many historians’ narrative. He believed only in “propaganda through deed” that led to the Saunders’ Murder, the Assembly Bombs and the record-breaking Hunger Strike in prison.
He was an avid reader of books, consisting of a variety of subject-matters: be it politics (obvious), economics, history, philosophy, Russian and English literature, Urdu poetries and so on. He was a charming young fellow with an immense respect for human life and a marked aversion towards all forms of totalitarian government. In retrospect, his well-thought-out attacks on selected institutions of power (police/militia, legislature, prison) make his stand approach close to the Foucauldian methodology of discerning the polymorphic power-relations through the ideological and repressive state apparatuses.
He visualized a free India, as we all know. What sort of India was that? Of course a secular one, in the sense of the free Indian state to be irreligious in its approach. He made this quite clear through his creation of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha back in 1926 that made religion a personal affair and separated it from the realm of politics. He championed the cause of annihilation of caste and the promotion of communal harmony. He never negated his multiple cultural roots, but rather integrated it with the radical revolutionary ideals of the West, including the ethos of the American and French revolutions, the Italian and Irish revolutions, and most prominently, the Russian Revolution. He was also motivated by the Turkish resurgence, the Punjab Peasants’ Movement (1907) led by his uncle Sardar Ajit Singh and the Ghadar Rebellion. He took Ghadar giant Shaheed Kartar Singh Sarabha as his role model. He was clear that the free India of his dreams shall be a Socialist Republic that would not merely substitute one set of rulers for another through a mere transfer of power, but bring about a radical reconstruction of the social fabric from its very roots. This is the reason why he was the person to first popularize the slogan: “Inquilab Zindabad” (Long Live Revolution), first given by Maulana Hasrat Mohani in the course of the then workers’ movements in various industrial centres of India.
He worked as a journalist for many newspapers of his day, often taking on pseudonames to avoid surveillance, wrote widely about Indian revolutionaries (even forgotten ones), did constructive work at the grassroots with his comrades such as Bhagwati Charan Vohra, Batukeshwar Dutt, Sukhdev, among significant others. His ideal of free India was that of an India without exploitation of one human by another, and without exploitation of one nation-state by another. Thus, economic exploitation with the concentration of private capital in fewer hands and/or imperialist onslaught were his primary targets, along with the lingering evil of inhuman casteism and divisive religious fanaticism that breeds blind faith and dogmatism at the cost of liberty and free-thought. In the long-term, he visualized a completely independent (purna swaraj) world federation without borders, one that would promote harmony of communities and have ample space for free deliberation or dialogue without necessitating a coercive state and a providential God. The two evils that Bakunin designated as the chief obstacles to human progress.
As it is clear, our present day India is very far from reaching that ideal. Under the rule of religious extremist and crony Saffron Fascists, the Shaheed-e-Azam’s idea of free India has evaporated into thin air. Or has it? Through a hauntological always-already presence, Bhagat Singh is still an existent being in this text. He is still widely read amongst sections of youth in our country as well as during the recent farmers’ movement. He is one of the primary motivations of resistance by the students of the so-called “post-independent” India. Through his life’s legacy and his many writings/speeches, he inspires non-conformity with regard to the status-quo establishment. Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh is the icon of the right to dissent and the right to revolt, a stance that was built from his readings of thinkers such as Locke and Thomas Paine, who always found it legitimate on the part of the masses to rise in revolt against unjust, oppressive socio-political orders.
The specific point that I would like to raise through this essay is related to the three new criminal laws that have been introduced by the BJP and will take effect from July 1, 2024. I think that Bhagat Singh’s ideas become relevant more than ever in the context of discussing and critiquing this set of laws that were passed without discussion in the Parliament after suspending most of the elected opposition party-members from the House!
For detailed information and analysis of these highly problematic and draconian laws, view the following:
When I was going through the harmful changes that have been brought to the three substitutive laws for the purpose of composing the above post, I could not help but notice the striking resemblances that they bear to the times of Bhagat Singh.
Let me be clear on this issue. As we all know, Bhagat Singh, accompanied by B. K. Dutt, threw a few harmless bombs in the then Central Assembly (Lok Sabha of the Old Parliament Building) on 8th April, 1929. Why? It was to stop the two draconian bills introduced by the British Government: the Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Bill, from becoming laws. The British imperialists were trying to execute these laws by bringing an Ordinance, where the Viceroy’s special vested power was to be exercised. Both these laws were anti-people and anti-democratic at their core, and for this reason, Bhagat Singh wanted to register a loud voice that would make the deaf hear, inspired from the anarchist revolutionary Auguste Vaillant, who bombed the French parliament to similarly oppose such anti-people legislation.
For a detailed overview of the entire Assembly Bomb event in 1929, view the following:
8th April, 1929: a milestone in India’s freedom struggle VIEW HERE ⤡
Why were the two bills introduced by the Britishers so draconian? Well:
- The Public Safety Bill aimed towards enabling the British Government to arbitrarily deport the anti-British agitators and ultimately snatch individual freedom. It was especially introduced in order to repress the growing communist activities in India.
- The Trade Disputes Bill contained penal clauses against the utilization of the trade union organization by the working class for the political coercion of the civil authority.
As recalled by one of Bhagat Singh’s comrades, Shiv Verma, the Shaheed-e-Azam said:
“The government had become deaf: it does not hear the voice raised against these laws all over the country. We would have to open its ears.”
These unjustified laws were introduced by the colonialists to stifle the workers’ movements that were dominating the atmosphere of British India at that juncture with increased workers’ strikes. It is to be noted that the British Government was defeated on the Public Safety Bill in the Select Committee meeting of the Central Assembly, 62 to 61 with the help of the Assembly President’s casting vote, due to which these laws were going to forcibly passed in a tyrannical manner under the then Viceroy Lord Irwin’s dictates.
Singh and his comrades’ Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) wanted to do something sensational that would awaken the spirit of the country to resist the authoritarian exploitation that was being carried out by the British capitalists. The bombs were specifically designed to avoid any major injury or bloodshed, and hence were thrown into the empty/vacant spaces of the Assembly.
Singh had studied law closely over the years, as is evident from his jail notebooks. When he was questioned in the court of law following this Assembly Bomb Incident, he highlighted the fact how the ‘motive’ of a supposed crime must be carefully considered to decide the matter non-arbitrarily. Singh was an ardent supporter of the Reformative theory of punishment that goes against the death penalty/capital punishment.
Bhagat Singh was clear when he said:
“There is no place for justice in British imperialism. They do not want to give even a breathing space to the slaves and instead, want to suppress them. They want to rob them and kill them. More and more oppressive laws will be passed and the dissenting voices will be put down. Let us see what happens. Only sacrifice can save us from this repression. The eyes of Indian and British members of the Assembly will have to be opened.”
Doesn’t this entire indictment sound like a very contemporary comment on the present-day Indian polity? Striking, isn’t it?
The Delhi Assembly Bomb incident was more than a mere revolutionary action. It was a deterrent, non-violent act that shook the foundations of the imperialist power.
After this incident, Singh and Dutt readily and wilfully offered themselves for arrest, following which they started using the court-platform as a propaganda machine to spread their radical views to the masses. This was necessary for mass mobilization at all levels. Singh wanted to hang the imperialists with the rope that they themselves will supply to him, following Lenin’s example of using the Tsarist Duma for propagating communist views in pre-revolutionary Russia. Lenin himself was against the parliament as a pigsty of Bourgeois parliamentarianism where laws are made to oppress the workers and farmers, but that did not stop him from utilizing it as a medium. Singh, following that same vein of thought, quoted Marx and Engels in his jail notebook (p. 65):
“Law, morality, religion are to him (the working man) so many bourgeois prejudices behind, which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”
Earlier, in the pink pamphlets that were thrown in the assembly hall after the harmless, non-lethal bombs were discharged, Singh wrote:
“It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear with these immortal words uttered on a similar occasion by Vaillant, a French anarchist martyr, do we strongly justify this action of ours. (…) the Government is thrusting upon us new repressive measures like the Public Safety and the Trade Disputes Bill, while reserving the Press Sedition Bill for the next session. The indiscriminate arrests of labour leaders working in the open field clearly indicate whither the wind blows (…) let the alien bureaucratic exploiters do what they wish, but they must be made to come before the public eye in their naked form (…) we want to emphasize the lesson often repeated by history, that it is easy to kill individuals but you cannot kill the ideas. Great empires crumbled while the ideas survived, Bourbons and Czars fell, while the revolution marched ahead triumphantly. We are sorry to admit that we who attach so great a sanctity to human life, who dream of a glorious future, when man will be enjoying perfect peace and full liberty, have been forced to shed human blood.”
We can see how Bhagat Singh was attacking the two bills along with the “Press Sedition Bill”, as he knew that these laws will be used to:
- repress all activities/movements of resistance;
- stamp protestors/revolutionaries as “terrorists”;
- declare all peaceful gatherings of protestors as “unlawful” and put them into jails indefinitely and without a proper trial;
- discard all forms of dissent, even if done democratically.
This exactly replicates the present-day format of the three criminal laws that are to come into force. These “new” laws are nothing more than old wine in a new bottle with added insidious poison. These laws, once they are applied fully, will start indiscriminate arrests of legitimate protestors such as students, journalists, authors, thinkers, scholars, farmers etc., as “anti-nationals”, “Urban naxals” etc., and keep them in prison for years without trial and without any substantial evidence against them. These laws are aimed to perpetuate an order that knows no dissent, no right to differ, and hence, no democracy. These laws will target the religious minority communities and the Dalits in favour of a Brahminical social order run by the Manusmrti and a few chosen corporate tycoons. The Sedition Act that Bhagat Singh protested against has reappeared as the Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. These laws also share their essence with the infamous Rowlatt Act that led to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre on 13th April, 1919, that resulted in Bhagat Singh choosing the path towards complete freedom from all forms of exploitation.
From the above account, it does seem that the BJP and its associates, being the bootlickers of the imperialists that they always were, are continuing the power-relations that characterized the colonial laws of the British administration. Hence, the present struggle to resist the implementation of these three laws is nothing less than a renewed second freedom struggle or a new independence movement. Whatever the Shaheed-e-Azam feared has become the reality of today and requires our voices of dissent and art of resistance if we are to truly pose ourselves as the inheritors of the great Indian revolutionaries and their indomitable sacrifices.
Bhagat Singh and his comrades were convicted in the Second Lahore Conspiracy Case, whose trial was merely a farce and a mockery of justice, where, under the Viceroy’s directives before the signing of the Gandhi-Irwin pact, “trials” continued even in the absence of the “accused” in a predetermined manner, where the sentences were decided beforehand. In a similar manner, those convicted at the present-day Indian Republic under the draconian UAPA, Sedition Act etc., continue to face the same fate where the mockery of a neutral and democratic judiciary has become more visible than ever in history.
Let us learn from history to educate, agitate and organize our forces to overthrow such unjust laws from taking hold of the liberal, progressive and democratic forces of the Indian nation-state in defence of the indispensable Freedom of Speech and Expression, the Freedom to Assemble Peacefully, the Freedom to Protest if needed, the Freedom to Revolt if the so-called “governing class” fails to stay accountable to the needs, rights and aspirations of the masses.
Farmers fall back on Bhagat Singh to wage their war: ‘He saw 90 years back what we are facing now’ VIEW HERE ⤡ (As reported on 27th September, 2020 ©The Indian Express)
I shall end with a quote from Bhagat Singh and B. K. Dutt’s joint statement before the Delhi Sessions’ Court on 6th June, 1929:
“We humbly claim to be no more than serious students of the history and conditions of our country and her aspirations. We despise hypocrisy; our practical protest was against the institution, which since its birth, has eminently helped to display not only its worthlessness but its far reaching power for mischief… …we have utterly failed to find any justification for the existence of an institution which, despite all its pomp and splendour, organized with the hard earned money of the sweating millions of India, is only a hollow show and a mischievous make believe…from under the seeming stillness of the sea of Indian humanity, a veritable storm is about to break out. We have only hoisted the ‘danger signal’ to warn those who are speeding along without heeding the grave dangers ahead.”
Let us make sense of Bhagat Singh’s warning call in the veritable here-and-now to decide what kind of India we want to envisage in the forthcoming years…
Books for Further Reading:
- Reminiscences of Fellow Revolutionaries, Shiv Verma
- Jail Notebook and Other Writings, Bhagat Singh (Compiled with an Introduction by Chaman Lal)
- The Bhagat Singh Reader (Edited by Chaman Lal)
- To Make the Deaf Hear: Ideology and Programme of Bhagat Singh and His Comrades, S. Irfan Habib
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 