Parliament security breach: How Bhagat Singh endures, even for the misguided
It's no surprise that even as legacies of Nehru, Patel & Gandhi are ensnared in modern-day political chambers, battle and fascination for Bhagat Singh endures
He lived for all of 23 years and 176 days, and died 92 years ago. Yet, he is everywhere -- in the brush stroke of his thin pencil moustache in graffiti adorning the walls of India’s villages; in the outline of his tilted-to-the-right fedora hat from his prison photograph on modern day bumper stickers and coffee mugs. He is, by government order, on the walls of every government office in Punjab. He is an arterial road in every city. And he has given his name to Chandigarh’s international airport.
Most recently, he is pasted all over the social media profiles of four young men and women who met online in a fan club dedicated to him, and on the day India marked 22 years to the Parliament attack in 2001, breached the security of one of India’s most hallowed (and protected) buildings, colour gas canisters in hand.
His name is Bhagat Singh, writer, philosopher, freedom fighter. In a country where history is now increasingly contested, where leaders are valorised and demonised in equal measure, he is everyone’s hero.
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Bhagat Singh was many things, all at once, deeply complicated, and deeply nuanced. It is nuance that allows for political appropriation, for little bits of his identity to be picked apart and owned. For the nationalists, he was the man who rejuvenated a sagging freedom movement by killing British police officer John Saunders as a 21-year-old, abjuring the notion of strain of the non-violence that was one feature of the Indian independence struggle.
He was an anarchist who read Bakunin.
For the Left, he was a working class hero, inspired by Lenin, Marx and Trotsky.
For the secularists, he was the man who was stunned by the bigotry in a country united by the desire to be free, but torn apart by communal fissures. He was an atheist and wrote in his seminal essay, Why I am an Atheist: “One of my friends asked me to pray. When informed of my atheism, he said, ‘When your last days come, you will begin to believe.’ I said, ‘No, dear sir, never shall it happen. I consider it to be an act of degradation and demoralisation. For such petty selfish motives, I shall never pray.’ Readers and friends, is it vanity? If it is, I stand for it.”
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It is no surprise then that even as the legacies of Nehru, Patel, even Gandhi are ensnared in modern day political echo chambers, the battle and fascination for Bhagat Singh endures.
On September 28, the day which marks his birth, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted a one minute video on X, celebrating Bhagat Singh and his struggle, and said, “Remembering Shaheed Bhagat Singh on his birth anniversary. His sacrifice and unwavering dedication to the cause of India’s freedom continue to inspire generations. A beacon of courage, he will forever be a symbol of India’s relentless fight for justice and liberty.”
In March 2022, when Bhagwant Mann took oath as Punjab’s chief minister for the first time, he did so in Khatkar Kalan, Bhagat Singh’s ancestral village. The turban her wears is always yellow; an homage to the freedom fighter. Amolak Singh, Punjab-based writer and convener of the Desh Bhagat Yadgar committee, a group that works to memorialise his legacy, said: “Different political parties repaint Bhagat Singh’s ideology and ideas according to their own suitability and vested interests.”
But it isn’t just political parties that have claimed him as their own. In many ways, Bhagat Singh, the young man in a fedora hat who killed a police officer, started a hunger strike in jail, and bombed Parliament and sat there calmly, is the ultimate anti-establishment hero. In modern-day India, therefore, in protest after protest, from that by farmers to that by wrestlers, he is the mascot; the man that adorns most cutouts, his “Inquilab Zindabad” renting the air.
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On Wednesday, his name was used as inspiration again -- for the wrong reasons, for the wrong end, and by the wrong people. Four men and women, from different parts of India, all angry at something that isn’t yet clear, planned an incursion of India’s Parliament, much like Bhagat Singh did in 1929. They had no bombs, but two of them breached the security apparatus of one of India’s most protected buildings, entered with colour gas canisters hidden in the soles of their shoes, rappelled down the visitors gallery, where one jumped across tables making his way to the well, and, when confronted, set off the device in Lok Sabha. Two were apprehended inside. The other two, caught by security personnel outside, raising slogans on unemployment, atrocities against women in Manipur, and “Jai Bhim” outside.
They had picked the day to coincide with one of India’s darkest memories, the 22nd anniversary of the Parliament attack.
With a photograph of Singh in the background, 26-year-old e-rikshaw driver from Lucknow, Sagar Sharma, one of the four, wrote on Facebook, “Jin naujavaanon ko kal desh ki bagdhor haath mein leni hai, unhe aaj hi akal ke andhe banana ki koshish ho rahi hai (The youth that have to take the reins of the country tomorrow, are being dumbed down today).”
A second, Neelam Azad, the serial protester from Hisar, titled a post on February 10 that read, “Naye Bharat ke nirmaan ke vaaste chalo Bhagat Singh ke raaste.”(To build a new India, we must walk the path of Bhagat Singh.”)
Amalok Singh said it was difficult to predict if Singh would have approved of their actions, but that it was clear that his life still fascinated the young. “Bhagat Singh’s life of 23 years on the whole fascinates the young people who follow his ideology, actions, writings and thoughts about the state then.”
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But Chaman Lal, former chairperson of the Centre of Indian Languages at Jawaharlal Nehru University and honorary adviser, Bhagat Singh Archives & Resource Centre, Delhi Archives, had a word of caution. “I don’t want to comment on yesterday’s episode because I don’t have proper knowledge. I can only say that millions of people across the globe admire Bhagat Singh but there are very few people who understand his ideas through his writings and actions,” Lal said.
This is key, because Bhagat Singh’s own writing, even on the subject of violence, is far from straightjacketed. All his action stemmed from a political context, of a country fighting against a vicious colonial power. All action, he said, must come from a cauldron of considered action. “Bombs and pistols do not make revolution. The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting stone of ideas,” Singh said.
In Why I am an Atheist, written when he was imprisoned in Lahore Jail in October 1930, Singh wrote even more extensively of his relationship with violence, and the change that arrived once he became responsible for a political party.
“An incessant desire to study filled my heart. ‘Study more and more’, said I to myself so that I might be able to face the arguments of my opponents. ‘Study’ to support your point of view with convincing arguments. And I began to study in a serious manner. My previous beliefs and convictions underwent a radical change. The romance of militancy dominated our predecessors; now serious ideas ousted this way of thinking. No more mysticism! No more blind faith! Now realism was our mode of thinking. At times of terrible necessity, we can resort to extreme methods, but violence produces opposite results in mass movements.”
Six months later, as prison guards arrived at his cell on March 23, to take him to the gallows, the legend is that Bhagat Singh sat reading a book on Lenin. His last request to his jailor was for more time to finish the chapter.
As both political parties and protesters rush to own his legacy, perhaps that, just reading, is a good place to begin. It’s something that may have encouraged the four perpetrators of Wednesday’s attack to perhaps hold their peace.