Bhagat Singh Hanged: India's Revolutionary Martyrs

Bhagat Singh walked to the gallows singing. The 23-year-old revolutionary and his comrades Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged at Lahore Central Jail on March 23, 1931, their executions moved forward by 11 hours to avoid the massive protests that British authorities knew would erupt. Their bodies were secretly cremated on the banks of the Sutlej River, and the ashes were scattered before supporters could recover them. Singh had been sentenced to death for the 1928 killing of British police officer John Saunders, shot in retaliation for the death of nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai during a police lathi charge. Singh and his associates had actually intended to kill police superintendent James Scott, who had ordered the charge, but mistook Saunders for their target. Rather than flee, Singh threw himself deeper into revolutionary action, bombing the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi in 1929 alongside Batukeshwar Dutt to, as he said, "make the deaf hear." Singh used his trial as a political platform. He refused to offer a legal defense, instead reading socialist tracts into the court record and going on a 116-day hunger strike to demand political prisoner status. His courtroom writings on Marxism, atheism, and anti-imperialism circulated widely, making him the most famous revolutionary in India after Gandhi, whose nonviolent methods Singh openly rejected. Mahatma Gandhi was negotiating the Gandhi-Irwin Pact during Singh's imprisonment and declined to make commutation of the death sentences a condition of the agreement. The decision haunted Gandhi's legacy in Punjab, where Singh became a folk hero whose popularity rivals Gandhi's to this day. Singh remains the only figure in Indian independence whose birthday is a state holiday in three different Indian states.