Without Fear

Book excerpt: BHAGAT SINGH (1907-1931) lived at a time when India's freedom struggle was beginning to fl ag and when Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent, passive resistance to partial liberation was beginning to test the patience of the people. The youth of India was inspired by Bhagat Singh's call to arms and enthused by the defiance and dare-devilry of the army wing of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association to which he and his comrades, Sukhdev and Rajguru, belonged. His call, Inquilab Zindabad! became the war-cry of the fi ght for freedom. When Bhagat Singh was executed by the British after a sham trial for his involvement in the Lahore Conspiracy Case at the age of twenty-three, he was glorifi ed by the Indians as a martyr - for his youth, his heroism, and his steadfast courage in the face of certain death. It was only many years later - after Independence in 1947 - that his jail writings came to light. Today, it is these works that set Bhagat Singh apart from the many revolutionaries who laid down their lives for India. They reveal him as not just a passionate freedom-fighter who believed in the cult of the bomb but a widely-read intellectual inspired by the writings of, among others, Marx, Lenin, Bertrand Russell and Victor Hugo; a revolutionary whose vision did not end with the ouster of the British, but who looked further, towards a secular, socialist India. In this book, commemorating the hundredth birth anniversary of this iconic young man, Kuldip Nayar takes a close look at the man behind the martyr: his beliefs, his intellectual leanings, his dreams and his despair. The book explains for the first time why Hans Raj Vohra turned approver and betrayed Bhagat Singh, and throws new light on Sukhdev, whose loyalties have been questioned by some historians. But most of all it puts in perspective Bhagat Singh's use of violence, so strongly condemned by Gandhi and many others as being extremist. Bhagat Singh's intent was never to kill the largest number or strike terror in the hearts of the British through the gruesomeness of his attacks; his fearlessness was not fuelled by the empty bravura of guns and youth. It was held together by the wisdom of his reading and the strength of his beliefs.