Who Was Bhagat Singh?

Bhagat Singh was born on 27 September 1907 in the village of Banga in the Lyallpur district of Punjab (now in Pakistan), into a Sandhu Jat Sikh family with a deep tradition of resistance to British rule. His father Kishan Singh and uncles Ajit Singh and Swaran Singh were all involved in the freedom movement — his uncle Ajit Singh was exiled for leading the Pagri Sambhal Jatta agitation of 1907. Revolution was, quite literally, in his blood.

As a 12-year-old boy, Bhagat Singh visited Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar days after the massacre of 13 April 1919, where General Dyer's troops fired on an unarmed crowd. The sight of the blood-soaked earth changed him forever. He is said to have collected soil soaked with the martyrs' blood and kept it as a sacred reminder.

He studied at the D.A.V. School and then National College in Lahore, an institution founded by Lala Lajpat Rai that fostered nationalist education. A voracious reader, he immersed himself in the works of Mazzini, Marx, Lenin, Rousseau and Indian revolutionaries. By his late teens he had left home to dedicate himself entirely to the cause, famously refusing marriage: "My life has been dedicated to the noblest cause — that of the freedom of the country."

Bhagat Singh was not merely a man of action; he was one of the finest political thinkers of his generation. He envisioned an India free not only from British rule but from poverty, communalism and exploitation. His famous slogan "Inquilab Zindabad" (Long Live the Revolution) — coined with his comrades — became the rallying cry of the entire freedom movement.

On 23 March 1931, Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar were hanged in Lahore Central Jail — executed seven hours ahead of schedule, in defiance of jail rules, to avoid the public outrage. He was 23. His last wish was to be shot by a firing squad as a prisoner of war; the British refused. Yet as he walked to the gallows, he was reading Lenin's biography — and refused to put it down, saying, "Let me finish one more page."