Bhagat Singh through his martyrdom 92 years ago (March 23, 1931) continues to exercise his magical influence on the present in multiple and diverse ways. He is undoubtedly the most celebrated revolutionary icon for anti-colonial theorists, historians and activists.
Marx’s famous words, ‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living…in epochs of revolutionary crisis they [the living] anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history…’ apply aptly to Bhagat Singh in the way movements and protests invoke Bhagat Singh symbols.
Bhagat Singh shirts, Rang de Basanti songs and dresses, and Inquilab Zindabad slogans make his presence very vivid and powerful in the present. Most recently in India, he was defiantly present in the farmers’ movement that defeated three farming laws brought in by the present Indian government to promote agro-business takeover and centralised control of Indian agriculture.
The Trial of Bhagat Singh: Politics of Justice, A.G. Noorani, Oxford, 2005.
A. G. Noorani’s The Trial of Bhagat Singh remains a pioneering work in exposing legal flaws in colonial governance, the political bankruptcy of the British Labour Party government under whose tenure the execution of Bhagat Singh took place and the compromising politics of Mahatma Gandhi in not putting the full pressure of Congress-led movement for national independence in opposing the execution of Bhagat Singh.
All three – the British government, the Labour Party and Gandhian politics – remain haunted by the spectre of Bhagat Singh’s execution. Two recent scholarly works on Bhagat Singh have brilliantly captured the invoking of Bhagat Singh’s revolutionary heritage in challenging the legal and political governance of our times.
Dr Chris Moffat, a Senior Lecturer in South Asian History at Queens Mary University, London in his India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and Promise of Bhagat Singh examines Bhagat Singh’s life and ideas as a part of his intellectual project of centring questions of commemoration, conjuring, silencing and haunting in the writing and remembrance of history.
The novelty of this work is that it ponders over the afterlife of Bhagat Singh by posing how his fearless struggle against misgovernance remains a source of powerful inheritance for generations living now. It is a masterly treaty on capturing the power of the dead on the living in the way Bhagat Singh has been studied.
‘The Execution of Bhagat Singh: Legal Heresies of the Raj,’ Satvinder Singh Juss, 2020.
The second recent scholarly work of outstanding merit on Bhagat Singh is by Dr Satvinder Juss, Professor of Law at Kings College London. His book titled The Execution of Bhagat Singh: Legal Heresies of the Raj is a remarkable work in exposing the fundamental legal flaws in the trial of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev.
This work is a fine example of writing a legal history which is simultaneously a political history. Law, politics, history and even a shade of colonial political economy stand tightly integrated into Juss’s argument.
Referring to the usual saying used by Edward Said that history is written by ‘those who win and those who dominate’, Juss posits his project as remembering those ‘who did not win and did not dominate’. Colonial rulers and their post-colonial successors in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh can claim to be winners of history as far as control of state power is concerned.
The colonial rulers tried to obliterate the legacy of Bhagat Singh by branding him as a murderer and terrorist who needed to be hanged and the post-colonial rulers have tried to marginalise that revolutionary legacy in the narratives of the history of India’s independence movement which have been circulated and officially promoted.
However, the use of the power of state institutions to promote a historical narrative does not necessarily mean that it is unquestionably victorious over the folk memories of historical events that get transferred from one generation to another. In my research on Bhagat Singh, I have found that Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom had so deeply touched the ordinary people of India at that time that he eclipsed all other leaders who subsequently became associated with state power in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Juss offers us another evidence in support of this research and takes it even further in the form of a photo of a popular poster circulated on India’s Republic Day in 2020 that shows Bhagat Singh standing tallest among all leaders who are credited with having contributed to India’s independence. It is worthwhile to mention the names of these other leaders who are shown in the poster as of significantly lesser importance than Bhagat Singh: Chandrasekhar Azad, Rani of Jhansi, Subhas Bose, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Maulana Azad and Mahatma Gandhi.
Juss employs the concept of ‘Coercive Colonial Legalism’, to highlight the legal flaws in Bhagat Singh’s trial. Five aspects of this coercive colonial legalism stand out as most glaring.
First, it was the act of taking the trial midway from the magistrate’s court where the judgement by the magistrate could be appealed against in the High Court to a Special Tribunal where the option of resorting to an appeal to the High Court was legally closed.
Second, the witnesses by the prosecution (457 in number) were not allowed to be cross-examined by the defence lawyers.
Third, the violation of an important legal point that an accused should not be tried by a law which did not exist when the accused was suspected of having participated in an activity for which he/she was being subjected to a trial.
Fourth, the Ordinance setting the Special Tribunal was never approved by either the Central Assembly in India or by the British Parliament.
Fifth, in the Special Tribunal’s judgement, Bhagat Singh and associates were called murderers and not accused which amounts to prejudging the outcome of the trial.
The revolutionary socialism of Bhagat Singh and associates was seen as dangerous with global implications for the British Empire, and this had an impact on the nature of the trial leading to the execution of Bhagat Singh. The judges who participated in their trial seem to be so riven with guilt that they wanted to forget this and none of them mentioned this trial in autobiographical accounts of their legal careers.
Juss’s work helps us to connect the flawed trial of Bhagat Singh to the ordinances, special tribunals and military trials used by the varied regimes in our times to silence their opponents. Remembering Bhagat Singh, the way Juss, Noorani and Moffat have empowers the methodology of studying the ghosts of the past haunting the present. While the unjust rulers draw their lessons for their modes of oppression from the past, those who fight for freedom and social justice remain continuously inspired by the memory and inheritance of Bhagat Singh and his associates.
Pritam Singh is Professor Emeritus of the Oxford Brookes Business School, Oxford, UK.
