Daily Times

March 23 was a significant date in the struggle for independence against British imperialist rule. However, there are some episodes and events that are deliberately forsaken, distorted and ridiculed by the ruling elite’s historians in the subcontinent. One such significant episode was the struggle of the Hindustan Revolutionary Socialist Association (HSRA) and its most renowned martyr Bhagat Singh. It was also March 23, 1931, when the twenty three year-old revolutionary and his comrades in arms Sukhdev and Raj Guru were assassinated through the gallows in the darkness of the night at Lahore Central Jail. Today the heroic and exemplary struggle and movement of the HSRA revolutionary youth is portrayed in Pakistan and India with different contours by the dominant media and sections of the ruling classes according to their own vested interests. In Pakistan the religious and conservative right condemn him as a kaafir (infidel) and a terrorist. His Sikh ancestry is abused to distort his beliefs and ideological convictions. Right wing analysts reject any role for Bhagat Singh in the struggle against the imperialists not only because it is a source of unity for the people of the subcontinent but also because his socialist ideas are still potent today. The movement led by the HSRA signified a desire to not just end imperialist rule but also the system imposed during colonial subjugation of the region. In India portrayals of Bhagat Singh are even more ironic. Recently the Hindu fundamentalist mascot and darling of the Indian bourgeoisie, Narinder Modi, was invited to inaugurate a book based on Bhagat’s memoirs, proving that even now Bhagat Singh retains enormous popularity amongst the youth, several generations after he was martyred. The Congress and other left reformist parties also try to cast Bhagat Singh as a bourgeois nationalist. However these false pretentions cannot hide the real ideological transformation Bhagat underwent and the conclusion that he drew at the end of his life that socialist revolution was the only path to salvation of the masses.

In his writings, Bhagat rejected class collaboration. He wrote in Outlines of a Revolutionary Programme: A Letter to Young Political Activists: “If you are planning to approach the workers and peasants for active participation, then I would like to tell you that they couldn’t be fooled through some sort of sentimental rhetoric. They will clearly ask you what your revolution would give them, for which you are demanding sacrifice from them. If in place of Lord Reading, Sir Purushottam Dass Thakur becomes the representative of the government, how would this affect people? How would a peasant be affected if Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru comes in place of Lord Irwin? The appeal to nationalist sentiments is a farce.” He also laid bare the real role of Gandhi and the Congress: “What is the motive of Congress? I said that the present movement would end in some sort of compromise or total failure. The real revolutionary forces have not been invited to join the movement. It is being conducted only on the basis of a few middle class shopkeepers and a few capitalists. Both of these classes, specifically the capitalists, cannot venture to endanger their property. The real armies of the revolution are in villages and factories — the peasants and workers. But our bourgeois leaders don’t dare take them along, nor can they do so. These sleeping tigers, once they wake up from their slumber, are not going to stop even after the accomplishment of the mission of our leaders.” Gandhi, the leader of the national bourgeoisie, expressed fear of the revolutionary class after the Bombay action of weavers by saying that the “use of the proletariat for political purpose would be very dangerous.” This sums up the contempt Gandhi and the bourgeois nationalist leaders had for the working class and their extreme fear of revolution.

Bhagat Singh was deeply impressed by the Ghadar (Rebellion) Movement and regarded Kartar Singh Sarabha as his hero. Bandi Jeewan by Sachindranath Sanyal, which included the first historical account of the movement by an insider, was a “basic textbook”, which he and his friends at the National School at Lahore read and discussed. There were in these simple-to-understand exhortations all the intimations of revolutionary struggle in an impossible situation. The Ghadar spirit of secularism was, to Bhagat Singh, a distinctly valuable trait, compared to the religious and mystical orientations of the other revolutionary groups in India at that time.

“Sanoon lorna Pandatan Kazian di;

Nahin shauq hai bera dubawne da”

(No Pundits or Mullahs do we need;

We are not for the sinking of our boat)

The addition of the word ‘socialist’ to the existing name of the Hindustan Republican Army in September 1928 was a natural progression. Appreciating that “criticism and independent thinking are the two indispensable qualities of a revolutionary,” they came to review the weaknesses that contributed to the failure of the Ghadar movement, particularly reliance on isolated armed struggle and mutiny within the British Army. The message that Bhagat Singh and B K Dutt sent to the Punjab Students Conference on October 19, 1929, symbolised their maturing revolutionary clarity:

“Today we cannot ask the youth to take to pistols and bombs… In the coming Lahore Session the Congress is to give a call for a fierce fight for the independence of the country. The youth will have to bear a great burden in this difficult time in the history of the nation…They have to awaken the millions and millions of slum-dwellers of the industrial areas and villagers living in worn-out cottages.”

On February 2, 1931, writing about the turning point in his revolutionary career, Bhagat Singh wrote, “I began to study, my previous faith and convictions underwent a remarkable modification. The romance of the violent methods alone, which was so prominent among our predecessors, was replaced by serious ideas. No more mysticism, no more blind faith. The revolutionaries know better than anybody else that the socialist society is the only destiny of human emancipation.”

Sixty-seven years after independence, the one fifth of the human race that inhabits this region is worse off than it was in 1947. The only way out of this excruciating poverty and deprivation is still the path of mass revolutionary movement and socialism that Bhagat Singh and his comrades envisaged and sacrificed their lives in pursuit of.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com