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Why slight martyrs in the name of democracy?
CHAMAN LAL
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Bhagat Singh represented one of the three major currents of the national freedom struggle
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Birinder Pal Singh in his piece ‘Why deify leaders in a democracy?’ (Open Page, ‘The Hindu’ January 25, 2009,) has tried to show that Bhagat Singh was made out to be ‘divine’ during his birth centenary in 2007. He has advised ‘the intellectuals’ ‘to not make mortal beings super human’. Do his arguments stand the test of objectivity?
It is a fact that Bhagat Singh became the icon of youth, patriotism and revolution shortly after his execution along with Sukhdev and Rajguru on March 23, 1931, at Lahore at the hands of British colonialism. An interesting part of his popularity among Indian masses is that even after 75 years of his execution, he attracted positive responses from Indian masses. This includes ‘The Hindu’ survey, which had 64 per cent approval rate along with Dr. Ambedkar and the recent ‘India Today’ survey, which gave him highest approval rate of 37 or 38 per cent, leaving Gandhiji, Nehru, etc, way behind. Only Subhas Chandra Bose came a distant second to Bhagat Singh. But one should know the masses covered by these surveys are not fully aware of Bhagat Singh’s personality or his ideas.
Partially understood
They are more impressed by his brave act of avenging the killing of the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai at the hands of colonial rulers by killing Saunders and upholding the voice of the freedom struggle by throwing bombs in the Central Assembly ‘to make the deaf hear’ and not kill anyone.
This is also a fact that from left to right, all shades of political opinion tried to colour him in their own political interests. RSS-like organisations tried to appropriate him as a staunch Hindu nationalist without bothering about his declared ideas. This has recently been done with Subhas Chandra Bose as well, angrily reacted to by Netaji’s own established party, Forward Bloc.
The birth centenary of Bhagat Singh was celebrated at two levels — the Government of India was rather forced by Left pressure to declare it at the official level; otherwise, it was celebrated mostly at people’s level in most parts of the country and abroad — Pakistan, Canada, England, USA, Australia, etc.
The taste of official functions can be gauged by the spending of nearly four crore rupees by the Punjab government in sheer wasteful extravagance. Out of these Central funds, only Rs. 50,000 each was given to Punjabi University, Patiala, and Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, for holding seminars, which they held in a great hurry without much preparation.
Punjab University, held a three-day national seminar sponsored by ICHR and the first-ever three-day national seminar on Bhagat Singh was held at Mumbai University in March 2007 without any agency or government support. By far that is the best seminar held on Bhagat Singh in the country.
In most of these seminars, historians tried to look at Bhagat Singh from a Gandhian perspective, without bothering to discuss his own writings and tried to find fault with his kind of revolutionary transformational approach, which suits the establishment. Very few scholars tried to project Bhagat Singh in his own declared ideological perspective, i.e., revolutionary socialist perspective. This is a very limited and objective characterisation of Bhagat Singh. But Bhagat Singh represented one of the three major currents of the national freedom struggle.
Socialist ideals
The most effective was led by the Indian National Congress under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, the second was led by the RSS and the Muslim League-like sectarian and communal forces. Bhagat Singh, E.V. Ramasamy Naicker (Periyar), Dr. Ambedkar and Netaji Subhas Bose like leaders represented the third current — to transform Indian society on socialist ideas with some differences on approach.
Periyar was the first to eulogise Bhagat Singh in his editorial on March 29, 1931, in his journal ‘Kudi Aarsu’. He also got his essay, ‘Why I am an Atheist’ translated in Tamil for P.Jivanandam and published it in 1933.This is the first and earliest translation of Bhagat Singh’s seminal essay in any Indian language. Bhagat Singh held no special status than Sukhdev and Rajguru or Chandershekhar Azad like revolutionaries. He was given a central figure role as he represents the whole revolutionary current of the freedom struggle, being its ideological and organisational leader, like Gandhiji in the Congress. The first-ever Bhagat Singh chair in any Indian university has only now been established in the JNU, New Delhi.
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