One of the most inspirational icons of the Indian freedom struggle, Bhagat Singh was born on September 28, 1907 in the Khatkar Kalan village near Banga in the Lyallpur district of Punjab. Born into a Sikh family with a proud legacy of revolutionary activities against the British rule, Bhagat Singh cultivated his revolutionary zeal from a tender age.
The notorious Jalianwala Bagh Massacre in 1919 left an indelible scar
on the mind of Bhagat Singh and soon he took up the membership of the
youth organization Naujawan Bharat Sabha. Apart from mingling with noted
revolutionaries such as Chandrasekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh worked
relentlessly to garner opposition against the British.
In 1928, when the Simon Commission came to India, it was met with
peaceful protests all over the country. During one such protest march in
Lahore on October 30, veteran leader Lala Lajpat Rai was mercilessly
beaten up by police chief Scott and Lala later succumbed to the fatal
injuries. Bhagat Singh, who witnessed this macabre incident, hatched a
conspiracy to kill Scott but in an unfortunate case of mistaken
identity, DSP J.P. Saunders fell to the revolutionaries' bullets instead
of the police chief.
Bhagat Singh went into hiding to escape prosecution, but when the
British government enacted the draconian Defence of India Act, Bhagat
and his comrades at the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association again
planned to detonate a bomb in the assembly where the ordinance was going
to be passed. As per the plot, on April 8, 1929, Singh and Batukeshwar
Dutt stormed inside the court and threw bombs onto the corridors of the
assembly shouting "Inquilab Zindabad." Both Singh and Dutt
voluntarily courted arrest and they were sentenced to ' Transportation
for Life' for the incident.
But soon the British got wind of Bhagat Singh's involvement in the
killing of Saunders and along with Sukhdev and Rajguru, he was charged
with murder. True to his fearless soul, Bhagat Singh owned
responsibility of the murder and justified the act in a fiery statement.
After a farcical trial lasting five months, on March 23, 1931, Bhagat
Singh was hanged in Lahore with his fellow comrades Rajguru and Sukhdev.