Bhagat Singhਭਗਤ ਸਿੰਘ

Early life

Bhagat Singh was born on 27 September 1907 in the village of Banga in Lyallpur district of undivided Punjab, in what is today Pakistan. He came into a family already steeped in resistance to British rule: his father Kishan Singh and his uncle Ajit Singh were both active in anti-colonial agitation, and the boy grew up hearing talk of freedom at home. This household atmosphere shaped him early, giving him a political education long before he read any revolutionary text.

He studied at the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic School in Lahore and later at National College, Lahore, an institution founded by nationalists as an alternative to government-run colleges. In 1919, when he was twelve, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar shook the whole of Punjab, and the young Bhagat Singh is said to have visited the site and carried away soil soaked with the blood of the victims. The event hardened his conviction that British rule would not end through petitions.

Road to revolution

As a student, Bhagat Singh joined the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, a youth organisation he helped found in 1926 to mobilise young Indians against colonial rule. He also worked as a writer and editor for Punjabi and Urdu newspapers in Amritsar, using journalism to spread radical ideas. By 1928 he had become a leading figure in the Hindustan Republican Association, which that year was renamed the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, the HSRA, signalling its commitment to a socialist vision of free India.

Late in 1928 came the episode that made him famous across India. The nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai died after being injured in a police lathi charge during a protest against the Simon Commission in Lahore. The revolutionaries held the police superintendent James Scott responsible and plotted to kill him. On 17 December 1928, Bhagat Singh and Shivaram Rajguru shot dead a young probationary officer, John Saunders, having mistaken him for Scott as he left a Lahore police station. They escaped, but the killing set the colonial police on their trail.

The Assembly bombing and trial

On 8 April 1929, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt walked into the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi and threw two low-intensity bombs onto empty benches, then showered leaflets and shouted slogans before calmly courting arrest. No one was killed; the act was designed as propaganda, a way to force the colonial government and the Indian public to hear their message. At their trial they used the courtroom as a platform, popularising the cry of Inquilab Zindabad, long live the revolution.

In prison, Bhagat Singh led his fellow inmates in a hunger strike demanding that Indian political prisoners be treated with dignity rather than as common criminals. The strike drew wide sympathy and turned him into a household name. He also wrote extensively behind bars, including the essay Why I Am an Atheist, in which he argued for reason, materialism and a socialism free of religious dogma. These writings revealed a thinker far beyond his years, blending Marxist ideas with an uncompromising rationalism.

Execution and legacy

The colonial government tried Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev in the Lahore Conspiracy Case and sentenced all three to death. Despite appeals and public protests across India, they were hanged in Lahore Central Jail on 23 March 1931. Bhagat Singh was twenty-three years old. His body was secretly cremated on the banks of the Sutlej, and the news of his execution sparked strikes and demonstrations from Peshawar to Madras.

In death, Bhagat Singh became one of the most enduring symbols of India's freedom struggle. Villages across Punjab named their sons after him, his portrait hung in homes and offices, and his writings continued to circulate in pamphlets and books. For later generations he has stood for a particular ideal: fearless, thoughtful, and unwilling to separate the fight for independence from the fight for a just and equal society. Every year, 23 March is observed as Martyrs' Day in his memory.