"It is easy to kill individuals but you cannot kill the ideas" Shaheed Bhagat Singh

Commemorating the Martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar, Shivram Rajguru, March 23rd, 2021

Leaflet thrown in the Central Assembly Hall, New Delhi at the time of the throwing voice bombs…

On the 8th April, 1929, the Viceroy's proclamation, enacting the two Bills, was to be made, despite the fact that the majority of members were opposed to it, and had rather rejected in earlier.

THE HINDUSTAN SOCIALIST REPUBLICAN ARMY(NOTICE)

"It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear, with these immortal words uttered on a similar occasion by Valiant, a French anarchist martyr, do we strongly justify this action of ours."

"Without repeating the humiliating history of the past ten years of the working of the reforms (Montague-Chelmsford Reforms) and without mentioning the insults hurled at the Indian nation through this House-the so-called Indian Parliament-we want to point out that, while the people expecting some more crumbs of reforms from the Simon Commission, and are ever quarrelling over the distribution of the expected bones, 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."

"In these extremely provocative circumstances, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, in all seriousness, realizing their full responsibility, had decided and ordered its army to do this particular action, so that a stop be put to this humiliating farce and to let the alien bureaucratic exploiters do what they wish, but they must be made to come before the public eve in their naked form."

"Let the representatives of the people return to their constituencies and prepare the masses for the coming revolution, and let the Government know that while protesting against the Public Safety and Trade Disputes Bills and the callous murder of Lala Lajpat Rai, on behalf of the helpless Indian masses, we want to emphasize the lesson often repeated by history, that it is easy to kill individuals but you connot kill the ideas. Great empires crumbled while the ideas survived. Bourbons and Czars fell. While the revaluation 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. But the sacrifice of individuals at the altar of the 'Great Revolution' that will bring freedom to all, rendering the exploitation of man by man impossible, is inevitable."

"Long Live the Revolution."
Sd/-
Balraj
Commander-in-Chief

"Bhagat Singh did not become popular because of his act of terrorism but because he seemed to vindicate, for the moment, the honour of Lala Lajpat Rai, and through him of the nation. He became a symbol; the act was forgotten, the symbol remained, and within a few months each town and village of the Punjab, and to a lesser extent in the rest of northern India, resounded with his name.” Jawaharlal Nehru

Bhagat Singh, a great reader and thinker was able to break the jail conditions, even when officially not allowed he was reading and writing but finally after long hunger strike got the right of reading & writing included in Jail Manuals Thus he maintained a note book of 404 pages and kept notes & quotes from the books he read.

"They may kill me, but they cannot kill my ideas. They can crush my body, but they will not be able to crush my spirit" 

"Revolution is an inalienable right of mankind. Freedom is an imperishable birth right of all"

"I am such a lunatic that I am free even in jail"

"I am full of ambition and hope and charm of life. But I can renounce everything at the time of need'

"If the deaf have to hear, the sound has to be very loud"

"Merciless criticism and independent thinking are two traits of revolutionary thinking. Lovers, lunatics and poets are made of the same stuff" 

"One should not interpret the word 'revolution' in its literal sense. Various meanings and significance are attributed to this word, according to the interests of those who use or misuse it. For the established agencies of exploitation it conjures up a feeling of blood-stained horror. To the revolutionaries, it is a sacred phrase"

"Bombs and pistols don't make a revolution. The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting stone of ideas"

"Labour is the real sustainer of society"

"People get accustomed to the established order of things and tremble at the idea of change. It is this lethargic spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit"


Bhagat Singh 1907 – 23 March 1931) was an Indian socialist revolutionary whose two acts of dramatic violence against the British in India and execution at age 23 made him a folk hero of the Indian independence movement.

In December 1928, Bhagat Singh and an associate, Shivaram Rajguru, fatally shot a 21-year-old British police officer, John Saunders, in Lahore, British India, mistaking Saunders, who was still on probation, for the British police superintendent, James Scott, whom they had intended to assassinate. They believed Scott was responsible for the death of a popular Indian nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai as a result of having ordered a lathi charge in which Rai was injured, and, two weeks thereafter, died of a heart attack. As he exited a police station on a motorcycle, Saunders was felled by a single bullet fired from across the street by Rajguru, a marksman. Lying injured on the ground, he was then shot up close several times by Singh, the postmortem report showing eight bullet wounds. Another associate of Singh, Chandra Shekhar Azad, shot dead an Indian police constable, Chanan Singh, who attempted to pursue Singh and Rajguru as they fled.

After having escaped, Singh and his associates publicly announced avenging Lajpat Rai's death, putting up prepared posters that they had altered to show Saunders as their intended target, their own names appearing under pseudonyms. Singh was thereafter on the run for many months, and no convictions resulted at the time.

Surfacing again in April 1929, he and another associate, Batukeshwar Dutt, set off two improvised explosive devices inside the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. They showered leaflets from the gallery on the legislators below, shouted slogans, and then allowed the authorities to arrest them. The arrest, and the resulting publicity, brought to light Singh's complicity in the John Saunders case. Awaiting trial, Singh gained much public sympathy after he joined fellow defendant Jatin Das in a hunger strike, demanding better prison conditions for Indian prisoners, the strike ending in Das's death from starvation in September 1929. Singh was convicted and hanged in March 1931, aged 23.

1929 Assembly incident and arrest

For some time, Singh had been exploiting the power of drama as a means to inspire the revolt against the British, purchasing a magic lantern to show slides that enlivened his talks about revolutionaries such as Ram Prasad Bismil who had died as a result of the Kakori conspiracy. In 1929, he proposed a dramatic act to the HSRA intended to gain massive publicity for their aims.

Influenced by Auguste Vaillant, a French anarchist who had bombed the Chamber of Deputies in Paris, Singh's plan was to explode a bomb inside the Central Legislative Assembly. The nominal intention was to protest against the Public Safety Bill, and the Trade Dispute Act, which had been rejected by the Assembly but were being enacted by the Viceroy using his special powers; the actual intention was for the perpetrators to allow themselves to be arrested so that they could use court appearances as a stage to publicise their cause.

The HSRA leadership was initially opposed to Bhagat's participation in the bombing because they were certain that his prior involvement in the Saunders shooting meant that his arrest would ultimately result in his execution. However, they eventually decided that he was their most suitable candidate. On 8 April 1929, Singh, accompanied by Batukeshwar Dutt, threw two bombs into the Assembly chamber from its public gallery while it was in session. The bombs had been designed not to kill, but some members, including George Ernest Schuster, the finance member of the Viceroy's Executive Council, were injured.

The smoke from the bombs filled the Assembly so that Singh and Dutt could probably have escaped in the confusion had they wished. Instead, they stayed shouting the slogan "Inquilab Zindabad!" ("Long Live the Revolution") and threw leaflets. The two men were arrested and subsequently moved through a series of jails in Delhi.

Bhagat Singh, Shivram Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar were sentenced to death in the Lahore conspiracy case and ordered to be hanged on 24 March 1931. The schedule was moved forward by 11 hours and the three were hanged on 23 March 1931 at 7:30 pm in the Lahore jail. It is reported that no magistrate at the time was willing to supervise Singh's hanging as was required by law. The execution was supervised instead by an honorary judge, who also signed the three death warrants, as their original warrants had expired. The jail authorities then broke a hole in the rear wall of the jail, removed the bodies, and secretly cremated the three men under cover of darkness outside Ganda Singh Wala village, and then threw the ashes into the Sutlej river, about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) from Ferozepore.

Criticism of the tribunal trial

Singh's trial has been described by the Supreme Court as "contrary to the fundamental doctrine of criminal jurisprudence" because there was no opportunity for the accused to defend themselves. The Special Tribunal was a departure from the normal procedure adopted for a trial and its decision could only be appealed to the Privy Council located in Britain. The accused were absent from the court and the judgement was passed ex-parte. The ordinance, which was introduced by the Viceroy to form the Special Tribunal, was never approved by the Central Assembly or the British Parliament, and it eventually lapsed without any legal or constitutional sanctity.