Sukhdev Thaparਸੁਖਦੇਵ ਥਾਪਰ

Early life in Ludhiana

Sukhdev Thapar (15 May 1907 to 23 March 1931) was a Ludhiana born revolutionary who led the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in Punjab and was hanged at the age of 23 with Bhagat Singh and Shivaram Rajguru in the Lahore Conspiracy Case. The day of their execution, 23 March, is observed across India as Shaheed Diwas, Martyrs Day, and of the three men hanged that day, Sukhdev was the one named first in the case itself.

He was born in the Naughara area of old Ludhiana to Ramlal Thapar and Ralli Devi, in a Punjabi Khatri family. His father died when Sukhdev was very young, and he was brought up largely by his uncle, Lala Achintram. After early schooling at Lyallpur he attended Arya High School and passed his high school examination in 1922. His defiance showed early: accounts of his school years say he refused to salute visiting British military officers and was caned for it, and that the arrest of his uncle in his teens pushed him further towards activism.

National College and the making of a revolutionary

For further study Sukhdev went to Lahore and joined National College, the nationalist institution founded in the spirit of the Non Cooperation Movement, where students were taught outside the government recognised system. It was there that he first met Bhagat Singh, and the two became close friends and lifelong comrades. At the college Sukhdev organised study circles where young men read and argued over world revolutionary literature and the Russian Revolution, working out for themselves how colonial rule might be fought. In 1926 he helped build the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, the open youth organisation founded that year to spread political consciousness among young Punjabis.

What was Sukhdev Thapar's role in the HSRA?

Sukhdev Thapar was the chief of the Punjab unit of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, and its organiser in the province: while Bhagat Singh became the public face of the Punjab revolutionaries, Sukhdev built and ran the network behind him. He set up revolutionary cells in Punjab and other parts of northern India, recruited and placed members, and was instrumental in the association's major decisions. Contemporaries remembered him as the planner of the group, the man who provided the ideas and assigned the roles, and who kept the organisation supplied and disciplined between its actions.

The Saunders killing and the Lahore Conspiracy Case

In October 1928 Lala Lajpat Rai, the veteran leader from Punjab, was badly injured in a police lathi charge on a Lahore protest against the Simon Commission, and he died of his injuries weeks later. The HSRA resolved to avenge him by killing James Scott, the senior police officer held responsible for the charge. Sukhdev planned the operation and chose Bhagat Singh for the shooting. On 17 December 1928 Bhagat Singh and Rajguru shot dead Assistant Superintendent John Saunders in Lahore, mistaking him for Scott. Sukhdev was arrested in March 1929 when police raided a bomb factory in Lahore that he was supervising, and he was found with a loaded revolver.

The trial that followed was officially titled Crown versus Sukhdev and others, and its first information report, filed in April 1929, lists Sukhdev as accused number one. The Lahore Conspiracy Case, as it became known, tried the revolutionaries for the Saunders killing and the wider conspiracy against the state. Sukhdev, Bhagat Singh and Rajguru were all sentenced to death.

Prison, hunger strike and execution

In prison Sukhdev took part in the hunger strike of 1929, in which revolutionary prisoners protested against the inhuman treatment of political prisoners and demanded to be treated as political detainees rather than ordinary criminals. From jail he also wrote to Mahatma Gandhi, taking issue with Gandhi's public condemnation of revolutionary methods. Appeals and a nationwide campaign for mercy failed. On the evening of 23 March 1931, Sukhdev Thapar was hanged in Lahore Central Jail with Bhagat Singh and Rajguru, a day ahead of the date the public expected. Their bodies were taken out secretly and cremated on the banks of the Sutlej River near Hussainiwala.

How is Sukhdev Thapar remembered today?

Sukhdev is remembered today at the National Martyrs Memorial at Hussainiwala, near Ferozepur, raised at the place where the three men were cremated, where tributes are paid every 23 March. In the capital, Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies of the University of Delhi, established in August 1987, carries his name. In his home city, Ludhiana's main inter state bus terminal is named the Amar Shaheed Sukhdev Thapar Inter State Bus Terminal, so that his name is spoken daily by travellers in the city where he was born. Within Punjab's story he holds a particular place: the organiser from Ludhiana without whom the more famous names around him would have had no organisation to stand on.