While all this is known, what is not so well-known is that in a very short life span of less than 24 years, Bhagat Singh wrote four books and they were all written in Lahore Jail in the last two years of his life. Unfortunately for posterity, though those books were smuggled out, yet they were subsequently destroyed and thus lost for ever. What has survived is a JAIL NOTEBOOK that Bhagat Singh kept as a young martyr which is full of notes and occasional jottings from what he was reading in jail.
The Congress Party has considered only the jail writings of Nehru and Gandhi as relevant or sacred to the nation. Thus sixty years after August 15 1947, on the eve of Independence Day tomorrow, we are a nation�a mere notion�without an identity, a nation without a soul. We have political scoundrels holding the highest public offices in the land having the audacity to describe great freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Raja Guru and Chandrashekar Azad as terrorists.
The anecdotes and stories associated with Bhagat Singh's childhood have become a part of song, legend and popular story in Punjab and several other parts of India. As a child of four, he told the well-known freedom fighter Mehta Anand Kishore that 'he would sow riffles in the fields, so that trees would yield weapons with which the British could be driven away'. As a boy of 12, he visited the Jallianwalabagh a few days later after the massacre in April 1919 and brought back as sacred souvenir a pack of blood soaked earth. His grandfather S. Arjun Singh was a staunch Arya Samajist and under his inspiration Bhagat Singh learnt Sanskrit, in addition to Urdu, English and Hindi.
It is amazing to note that even as a young boy of 15, Bhagat Singh was hotly debating with his father Mahatma Gandhi's knee-jerk decision to withdraw the Non-Cooperation Movement following the Chauri Chaura massacre in the United Provinces (UP) in 1922. The withdrawal of Non-Cooperation Movement had the immediate effect of radicalizing the youth of India.
There is no doubt that great revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, Chadrashekar Azad, Sukhdev, Rajaguru and many others chose the path of armed revolution only because of Mahatma Gandhi's tepid decision to call off the Non-Cooperation Movement. Thus many sections of the youth were attracted to the revolutionary groups of Anushilan and Yugantar in Bengal or the Hindustan Republican Association in the United Provinces (UP).
Bhagat Singh went to Kanpur in 1923 after writing to his father that he would not marry since he was determined to dedicate his whole life to the cause of the nation. In Kanpur he joined Pratap, a newspaper whose Editor at that time was Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, one of the front rank Congress leaders in UP. Bhagat Singh started writing in the Pratap under the pen name Balwant. When six Babbar Akali Revolutionaries were executed in 1926, Bhagat Singh wrote a fiery article '
Blood Drops on Holi Day� ('Holi ke Din Rakt ke Chhinte') was published in the Pratap with the byline 'A Punjabi Youth'. Simultaneously Bhagat Singh was also writing for a Punjabi journal run by the Ghadarite Revolutionaries of Punjab called Kirti(Punjabi). He wrote on leading contemporary issues of the time on public subjects as varied as �Communalism and its Solution', 'Problem of Untouchability', 'Religion and Our Freedom Struggle�etc. Through his seminal articles in Kirti journal, Bhagat Singh clearly demonstrated his versatile ability as a fearless journalist and freedom fighter.
Anyone can see from this Jail Notebook that Bhagat Singh was a great scholar and voracious reader. An economist, a political scientist, a historian, a sociologist, an agitator, a freedom fighter and above all a martyr in the cause of India's freedom�Bhagat Singh was all this and more. We can also see that as a student, his friends remembered him as being fond of films, especially Charlie Chaplin's Films. As a good singer and actor, he took part in college plays.
The Jail Notebook became well-known in India only after 1994. Long before that, the Soviet scholar L.V. Mitrokhin discussed the Notebook in detail in 1981 in his book 'Lenin and India', the Hindi translation of which was published in 1990. In this book, Mitrokhin devoted one full chapter to 'The Last Days of Bhagat Singh'. Earlier Mitrokhin had written an article on 'The Books read by Bhagat Singh' in 1971. In the same year, another Soviet Scholar, A.V. Raikov also wrote an article on �Bhagat Singh and his Ideological Legacy'. Bhagat Singh was a great admirer of Lenin and therefore it is not surprising that the Soviet scholars ideologically placed him in the Marxist tradition. There can be no doubt about the fact that without visiting Russia, Bhagat Singh showed a greater understanding of nuances of Marxism and Leninism than Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru who wrote an infantile book on Russia after visiting that country in 1927. When the executioners came to his cell on the evening of March 23, 1931 to take him to the gallows, they found Bhagat Singh reading Lenin.
The historic trial of Bhagat Singh and his revolutionary comrades resulted in the cry �Inquilab Zindabad� (Long Live Revolution) throughout the country. When Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutta threw bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly and threw the copies of the historic pamphlet �TO MAKE THE DEAF HEAR� on April 8, 1929, the Assembly erupted and dissolved in commotion and consternation. Members ran helter-skelter. Only a very few�amongst them, Pundit Motilal Nehru, Madan Mohan Malviya and Jinnah�remained cool. On Bhagat Singh's specific directions, it had been earlier decided that after actually throwing the bombs, they would not try to escape, but would get arrested. As planned, Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutta heroically surrendered to the Police. The Hindustan Times in New Delhi brought out a special evening edition on 8 April, 1929, publishing the full text of the statement of Bhagat Singh and others contained in the historic pamphlet. They proclaimed:
'IT TAKES A LOUD VOICE TO MAKE THE DEAF HEAR', with these immortal words uttered on a similar occasion by Auguste Valliant (1861 - 1894), a French anarchist martyr, do we strongly justify this action of ours. �. Inquilab Zindabad!
To come back to Bhagat Singh's Jail Notebook and other writings, we should note that Bhagat Singh had three main agendas in jail from 8 April, 1929 till his execution on 23 March, 1931: a) To use the trial and the publicity he and his comrades were getting to spread the ideas of the great revolutionaries and propagate their message; b) To fully expose to the world the inhumanity and brutality of the British Colonial State by resorting to protests, including hunger strikes, inside the Jail; c) To equip and advance himself politically and ideologically by subjecting himself to the academic discipline of a rigorous and structured programme of extensive and intensive reading. While the whole of India knows that Bhagat Singh succeeded magnificently in achieving his first two agendas, yet it is unfortunate that the country as a whole is completely unaware of the fact that he was a great intellectual with extraordinary ideals and convictions who buried himself in a programme of unremitting intellectual toil and exertions during the last two years of his incarceration.
On page 37 of the Jail Notebook, Bhagat Singh has written the following famous lines of James Russel Lowell (1819-1891), American poet and editor of 'Atlantic Monthly':
'They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen and the weak;
They are slaves who will not choose
Hatred, scoffing and abuse,
Rather than in silence shrink
From the truth they needs must think;
They are slaves who dare not be
In the right with two or three'.
Tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of our independence. Given the disastrous political conditions in Sonia's India (and all her slaves in the UPA), I have no doubt that even if Bhagat Singh were given the option by God of coming back to life today, he would rather vote for instantaneous death with greater fervour, passion and anger than he did in 1931.
(To be contd...)
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