On the evening of 23 March 1931, three men were hanged inside Lahore Central Jail — eleven hours ahead of schedule. The British colonial administration had moved the execution forward from the morning of 24 March, afraid of what the morning would bring. Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru, and Sukhdev Thapar were hanged at 7:30 pm. No magistrate was willing to supervise the hanging as required by law; an honorary judge had to be pressed into service at the last moment.

The haste was not procedural. It was political. Petitions had been filed before the Lahore High Court on 22 March — one seeking leave to appeal to the Privy Council, another on fresh grounds under the Criminal Procedure Code. The court fixed both for hearing at 10 am on 23 March. The British government anxiously awaited the outcome, knowing that even the issuance of a notice could delay the execution and further inflame public sentiment. The court dismissed both petitions without issuing notice. By evening, the three revolutionaries were dead.

In his cell that afternoon, Bhagat Singh was reading *The Life of Lenin* by Clara Zetkin. A few pages remained when the senior jailor, Khan Bahadur Mohammad Akbar, entered and whispered that the execution had been moved to 7 pm. Bhagat Singh looked up and said: “So, I will not be allowed to finish my book.” Then he asked the jailor to wait. He completed the remaining pages, saluted the portrait of Lenin on the cover with a clenched fist, and handed the book over. “Give this last message from my side to the youth of the nation,” he said. He then told the jailor he was ready.

When Rajguru and Sukhdev came out of their cells, the three saw each other and embraced — Bhagat Singh in the centre, Sukhdev on the left, Rajguru on his right — arms locked together. They walked to the gallows singing. They had requested not to be handcuffed, and that their faces not be covered. Both requests were accepted. As they walked past Ward 14, they shouted “Inquilab Zindabad!” The other prisoners answered back.

After the execution, their bodies were cremated in secret by police on the banks of the Sutlej river. The authorities fled before dawn. The next day, comrades collected the remains from the cremation site. A procession was taken out in Lahore. The British Empire, which had just signed a peace pact with Gandhi eighteen days earlier, had executed three men in the dark and burned them without ceremony.

Bhagat Singh was 23 years old.

“A revolutionary is going to meet another revolutionary.”

Beyond the Poster

Ninety-five years on, the face is everywhere. The hat, the moustache, the upturned collar — on hoardings, WhatsApp forwards, party banners across the ideological spectrum. But the thought behind the face is far less circulated, and for good reason. Bhagat Singh represents a challenge to almost every tendency in Indian politics. Gandhi-inspired nationalists, Hindu nationalists, Sikh nationalists, the parliamentary left, and the pro-armed-struggle left all compete to appropriate his legacy — and each faces a fundamental contradiction in doing so.

Governments formed by the Hindu nationalist BJP have made sustained efforts to recast Bhagat Singh as a Hindu icon, stripping him of his Marxist and atheistic roots. This is not mere oversimplification — it is a deliberate inversion. Bhagat Singh was a committed atheist and a socialist who, while awaiting execution, was reading Lenin. He had spent his years in Lahore Central Jail in serious ideological study: Engels’ *Origin of the Family*, Trotsky’s *Lessons of October*, Rousseau, Marx, Bertrand Russell, Dostoevsky, Rabindranath Tagore. His jail notebook — preserved at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, acquired from his younger brother Kulbir Singh — is one of the most remarkable intellectual documents produced in the Indian independence movement. It contains the reading notes of a 22-year-old constructing a complete political philosophy from scratch, in a cell, awaiting the gallows.

In a 2008 poll by *India Today*, Bhagat Singh was voted the Greatest Indian, surpassing Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose. The irony is that the country that adores him has barely engaged with what he actually thought. The poster survives. The philosophy is inconvenient.

“The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting-stone of ideas.”

The Ideology They Don’t Teach

Bhagat Singh’s revolution was never simply about ending British rule. He was explicit on this. In a letter to young political workers, he wrote that revolution “means the complete overthrow of the existing social order and its replacement with the socialist order.” A transfer of power from British hands to Indian hands — from ‘Gore Sahib’ to ‘Bhure Sahib’, as he put it — was not freedom. It was a change of management.

His political programme rested on three integrated pillars. First, anti-imperialism inseparable from anti-capitalism: colonial rule was not an accident of history but a system of economic extraction, and dismantling it required dismantling the structures that made it profitable. Second, secularism as a strategic necessity: Bhagat Singh had watched the Hindu-Muslim riots that followed Gandhi’s disbanding of the Non-Cooperation Movement and concluded that communalism was not a social problem but a political weapon wielded by elites to prevent class solidarity. Third, atheism as intellectual freedom: not the casual disbelief of the indifferent, but the reasoned rejection of any authority — divine or political — that required submission rather than argument.

He wrote *Why I Am an Atheist* in his cell on 5 and 6 October 1930 — a direct, philosophical reply to a fellow prisoner, Baba Randhir Singh, who had accused him of rejecting God out of vanity. “I have read of atheists facing all troubles quite boldly,” he wrote, “so am I trying to stand like a man with head held high to the last, even to the gallows.” The essay was published posthumously in Lala Lajpat Rai’s *The People* on 27 September 1931. It was later translated into Tamil by P. Jeevanandham at the request of Periyar — a fact that tells you something about the intellectual networks connecting the anti-caste and anti-colonial movements.

The transformation of the Hindustan Republican Association into the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) in 1928, largely under Bhagat Singh’s influence, marked the explicit ideological evolution of the revolutionary movement. When he and Batukeshwar Dutt threw smoke bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly on 8 April 1929, the slogans shouted were not merely patriotic. They were: *Inquilab Zindabad. Workers of the World Unite. Down with Imperialism.* The act was theatre, consciously so. As Bhagat Singh later explained: the bombs were not meant to kill, but to make the deaf hear. The British Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Bill — designed to suppress worker organisation — had to be opposed loudly enough to register.

What is least remembered is Bhagat Singh’s critique of individual terrorism — a position he held explicitly in his later writings. Revolution, he argued, was not the act of a single bomb or a single heroic sacrifice. It was brought about by social and economic conditions, organised and guided by a disciplined party. “Bombs and pistols do not make a revolution,” he wrote. “The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting-stone of ideas.” This makes him deeply inconvenient for those who want to romanticise the gun while ignoring the notebook.

“Merciless criticism and independent thinking are the two necessary traits of revolutionary thinking.”

The Pact That Left Them to Die

On 5 March 1931 — eighteen days before the execution — Gandhi and Lord Irwin signed the Delhi Pact, which brought a temporary truce to the Civil Disobedience Movement. The Pact secured the release of over 90,000 political prisoners, restored some confiscated properties, and allowed Congress to participate in the Second Round Table Conference in London. Gandhi had requested, among other things, that the death sentences of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev be commuted to life imprisonment. Lord Irwin refused.

The Pact contained no provision concerning the three condemned men. Those convicted of revolutionary violence were explicitly excluded from the amnesty. The colonial government had long maintained a distinction between ‘political prisoners’ and ‘terrorists’, and the Pact implicitly accepted that distinction. In doing so, it created a hierarchy within the freedom movement itself: one stream of resistance was recognised and negotiated for; another was left outside the field of politics entirely.

Sukhdev, the most systematic organiser of the three, wrote a searing letter on the very day the Pact was signed, accusing Congress leaders of suppressing a revolutionary statement issued two days earlier because it had criticised Gandhi and senior party figures. “We are being strangled by these high-class leaders,” he wrote. The letter was not directed at the British. It was directed at the Congress.

When Gandhi arrived in Karachi for the Congress session just days after the execution, he was met with black flags and protestors demanding he leave. Even many within the Congress were troubled by what had happened. Subhas Chandra Bose had told Gandhi they should, if necessary, break with the Viceroy over the question of Bhagat Singh. Bose also acknowledged, however, that Gandhi had tried his best. The historian A. G. Noorani’s assessment was sharper: “Gandhi alone could have intervened effectively to save Bhagat Singh’s life. He did not, till the very last.”

The Karachi Congress session that followed passed a resolution — piloted by Nehru, seconded by Madan Mohan Malviya — placing on record the Congress’s admiration for the bravery and sacrifice of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru. Bhagat Singh’s own father, Kishan Singh, who was present, told the gathering not to blame Gandhi. “Bhagat Singh told me not to worry,” he said. “Let me be hanged.” He urged the crowd to support the Congress. Kishan Singh was a Congress supporter. His son had a different theory of power.

“It is easy to kill individuals, but you cannot kill ideas.”

The Three, Not Just the One

Shaheed Diwas has always had an asymmetry problem. Bhagat Singh’s face is the face of the date. Rajguru and Sukhdev are named, honoured, and then largely left at the edge of public memory. This unevenness matters, because movements are not carried only by the people history most loves to photograph.

Shivaram Rajguru — the youngest of the three, born in Khed in Maharashtra in 1908 — was the most direct of the trio. He was the sharpshooter who fired the bullet that killed Saunders in December 1928. He was also, by the accounts of those who knew him, the most instinctively fearless: where Bhagat Singh brought ideological architecture and Sukhdev brought organisational discipline, Rajguru brought a physical recklessness that the British found particularly difficult to account for. He was 22 when he was hanged.

Sukhdev Thapar was born in Ludhiana in 1907 and was, in many respects, the movement’s indispensable organiser. He worked with young people at the National College in Lahore, cultivating political consciousness rather than merely inspiring dramatic action. He co-founded the Naujawan Bharat Sabha with Bhagat Singh in 1926 and was the structural intelligence behind the HSRA’s operations. The colonial state regarded him with particular seriousness — he was not incidental to the Lahore Conspiracy Case; he was one of the people giving it shape. His letter to Gandhi on the day of the Pact remains one of the most morally urgent documents of the independence era.

Remembering all three, in their specificity, is not a matter of historical fairness alone. It is a corrective against the cult of the individual that tends to drain movements of their actual texture — the slow work, the arguments, the organising, the letters written at midnight before a trial that had already been decided.

The Uncomfortable Legacy

The easiest way to remember Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev is to praise their courage while ignoring their questions. The harder way is to ask what they were actually struggling against: not just foreign rule, but humiliation, exploitation, communal division, and the suppression of working people. Bhagat Singh’s writings tie freedom explicitly to workers’ rights, human dignity, and resistance to communalism. Read that way, Shaheed Diwas is not a moment of national consensus. It is a provocation.

Every political tendency in India claims Bhagat Singh and is contradicted by him. The BJP claims him; he was an atheist and a socialist who viewed Hindu nationalism as a tool of class interest. The Congress invokes him; he criticised the Congress as a party of the bourgeoisie that would replace British exploitation with Indian exploitation. The left reveres him; he was explicitly critical of individual terrorism and of the vanguardism that left mass political education behind. The revolutionaries venerate him; he spent his last years arguing that “revolution” without ideological transformation was just a change of oppressors.

In the 1926 article ‘Universal Brotherhood’, written when he was just seventeen, Bhagat Singh concluded: “If you are really interested in preaching peace, happiness and universal brotherhood, then learn to react against insult and indignity.” That sentence is a complete political philosophy in twenty-three words. It does not counsel patience. It does not counsel accommodation. It does not counsel the deferral of justice to a more convenient moment.

The revolutionary poet Avtar Singh Pash, who was later shot dead by extremists in Punjab, paid tribute to Bhagat Singh by saying that the youth of India needed to read the next page of the book that Bhagat Singh closed as he went to meet his death — the page he never reached because they came for him too soon.

That page remains unread. Ninety-five years later, that may be the most honest thing to say about Shaheed Diwas: not that the martyrs’ work is finished, but that we have not yet begun to take it seriously.

“I emphasise that I am full of ambition and hope and of full charm of life.”

The Hind covers policy, power, and strategic affairs from India’s perspective. Views expressed are analytical and editorial.