Bhagat Singh and Bose

1Who Bhagat Singh Actually Was

The making of him

Bhagat Singh was born in 1907 in the Lyallpur district of Punjab, in a Sandhu Jat Sikh family already deep in politics. His uncle Ajit Singh was a revolutionary who had been exiled. He was twelve when Jallianwala Bagh happened, and he went to Amritsar and brought back soil from the garden.

He joined the Non Cooperation Movement as a schoolboy and left his government school for the National College at Lahore. When Gandhi suspended the movement after Chauri Chaura in 1922, Bhagat Singh, then fifteen, took the lesson that many young men of his generation took: this method stops just when it starts working.

By 1928 he was a leading figure in the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. Note the middle word. It was added at his urging. His aim was not simply to remove the British but to change who owned the land and the factories afterwards.

The two acts

The killing of Saunders, 17 December 1928.In October 1928 Lala Lajpat Rai led a demonstration against the Simon Commission at Lahore and was beaten in a lathi charge ordered by Superintendent James Scott. He died on 17 November. The HSRA decided to kill Scott. On 17 December they shot the wrong man, John Saunders, an assistant superintendent, along with a head constable, Chanan Singh, who pursued them. Bhagat Singh escaped Lahore in disguise.

The Assembly bomb, 8 April 1929.This is the act that is most misunderstood. Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two low intensity bombs into an empty area of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. The bombs were deliberately designed not to kill, and nobody was killed. They scattered leaflets, shouted their slogans, and thenstood still and allowed themselves to be arrested, when they could easily have escaped in the confusion.

That was the whole point. Their leaflet said the aim was to make the deaf hear. They wanted a trial, because a trial was a stage, and a stage was the only way for a group of unknown young men to put a political argument in front of the entire country. It worked exactly as designed.

The hunger strike

In jail they demanded to be treated as political prisoners rather than as ordinary criminals: books, paper, decent food, dignity. When it was refused they went on hunger strike in June 1929. It lasted months and was force fed and brutal. On 13 September 1929, Jatindra Nath Das died on the sixty third day of his fast. His funeral procession in Calcutta was enormous.

This is the period in which Bhagat Singh became a national figure, and he did it not by killing anybody but by starving in a prison cell.

What he actually believed

Anyone who wants to claim him should first read what he wrote, because it is specific and it is inconvenient for most people who quote him.

• He was a socialist and a revolutionary,not simply a nationalist. His stated goal was the end of the exploitation of man by man, and he said plainly that swaraj which merely replaced white masters with brown ones was worthless.
• He was an atheist.In October 1930, in the condemned cell, he wrote an essay called Why I Am an Atheist, explaining that he had abandoned belief in God on rational grounds and refusing to take up religion for comfort as death approached.
• He was fiercely against communal politics.He wrote an article on communal riots in 1928 attacking both Hindu and Muslim communal leaders and the newspapers that fed the poison, and arguing that class was the real dividing line and religion the distraction.
• He did not glorify violence for its own sake.In To Young Political Workers, written on 2 February 1931 in the condemned cell, he explicitly warned that bombs and pistols do not make a revolution, that the sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetstone of ideas, and that the real work was organising workers and peasants over years.

To judge whether anyone could have saved him, you first have to know exactly how he was convicted and who had the legal authority to stop it. This chapter is dry. It is also the part that decides the argument.

2The Case, the Ordinance and Who Held the Power

The Lahore Conspiracy Case

Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were tried for the murder of Saunders, along with a wider conspiracy charge. The trial began in July 1929 and ran into 1930, and the accused used it as a platform exactly as intended, shouting slogans, refusing to cooperate and turning the courtroom into a political theatre.

The government found this intolerable, and here is where it becomes important.

The ordinance of 1 May 1930

The Viceroy, Lord Irwin, issued an ordinance creating aspecial tribunalof three judges to try the case. This tribunal had extraordinary powers. It could proceed in the absence of the accused. It could dispense with the ordinary procedures. And crucially,its verdict could not be appealed to the High Court.The only remaining route was a petition to the Privy Council in London, which was a narrow legal appeal rather than a rehearing.

Understand what this means. The government of India used emergency powers to construct a court specifically designed to convict these men quickly and to remove the normal appeal. That is not a legal system reaching a regrettable conclusion. That is an executive decision to hang them, executed through legal machinery.

The tribunal delivered its judgement on 7 October 1930. Death by hanging for Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev. The Privy Council appeal was dismissed in February 1931.

So who could have stopped it?

After the Privy Council dismissal, exactly one person had the legal power to commute the sentence:the Viceroy, exercising the prerogative of mercy. Not the courts. Not the Congress. Not Gandhi.

And the Viceroy was not a free agent either. He was under pressure from the Secretary of State in London, from the Punjab administration which regarded the HSRA as a live terrorist threat, and from a British official class that had watched a police officer shot dead in the street and would not accept mercy for it.

Keep that structure in mind for the next chapter. Gandhi could ask. Only Irwin could decide, and Irwin was answering to London.

3Could Gandhi Have Saved Him?

Step one: what the pact actually covered

The Gandhi Irwin Pact of 5 March 1931 provided for the withdrawal of the civil disobedience movement and, on the government side, the release of political prisonersnot convicted of violence, the return of confiscated property, and the right of coastal populations to make salt for personal use.

Bhagat Singh was convicted of murder. He fell outside the category the pact dealt with, and he did so by definition, not by oversight. That is why he was not released by the pact.

This is worth stating clearly because it is the source of much of the confusion. The pact did not exclude him through some sly drafting. It was an agreement about a nonviolent movement, and he had not been part of a nonviolent movement.

Step two: did Gandhi try at all?

This is the part where the popular claim simply fails against the record. He tried, repeatedly, and there is paper.

• He raised the case with Irwin during the negotiations themselves, which ran from 17 February to 5 March 1931. Irwin's own account records the conversation.
• He pressed again after the pact was signed, when the executions were announced.
• On 19 March 1931 he appealed to Irwin again for commutation.
• On themorning of 23 March 1931, the day of the hanging, he wrote a personal letter to the Viceroy making a final plea, in which he wrote that he had poured his whole being, heart and soul, into the appeal.
• Afterwards, in Young Indiaon 11 June 1931, he stated publicly that he had interested himself in the movement for the commutation of the death sentence of Bhagat Singh and his comrades.

So the claim "Gandhi did nothing" is not a matter of interpretation. It is false, and it is refutable from documents that anybody can read.

Step three: could he have forced it?

Now the harder question, and I am going to give the accusers their strongest ground.

The case that he could have.Gandhi had leverage in February 1931 that he never had again. The British wanted the civil disobedience movement stopped and they wanted Congress at the Round Table Conference. Gandhi could have said: no pact until the three men live. He did not. He asked as a supplicant when he could have demanded as a negotiator. And when a man with that much leverage asks politely instead of insisting, the outcome is not an accident.

The case that he could not.Irwin was not free to concede. Commuting the sentence of men convicted of shooting a British police officer, at the request of the leader of a movement the government had just spent a year suppressing, would have been read in London and in the Punjab administration as surrender to terrorism. Irwin later wrote about the pressure he was under and the impossibility, as he saw it, of commutation. There is also the government's own behaviour on the day, which tells you a great deal: the execution was carried out on theevening of 23 March, roughly eleven hours ahead of the scheduled time, and the bodies were removed secretly and cremated at Hussainiwala on the bank of the Sutlej during the night. A government that moves a hanging forward and disposes of the bodies in the dark is a government that is afraid of a reaction, not one that is weighing an appeal.

Gandhi's own stated reason.He argued that he could not make the pact conditional on the lives of three men, because that would turn a political settlement into a hostage negotiation, and because a pact obtained that way would have set a precedent that political agreements could be extracted by attaching lives to them.

Here is the part that almost never appears in the argument, and it changes the shape of it.

4What Bhagat Singh Thought of Gandhi

He rejected the method, sharply

Bhagat Singh was a serious critic of Gandhi, and his criticism was political rather than personal. He believed that Gandhi's leadership had repeatedly stopped short, that Non Cooperation had been abandoned at Chauri Chaura when it should have been intensified, and that the Congress leadership represented the interests of the propertied classes and would settle for a transfer of power that changed nothing for the peasant and the worker.

In To Young Political Workers, written weeks before he was hanged, he set out an alternative: a disciplined revolutionary party, patient organisation among workers and peasants, and a socialist republic as the goal rather than dominion status.

And he refused to be saved

This is the fact that the modern accusation cannot accommodate.

Bhagat Singh did not file a mercy petition. He was explicitly opposed to doing so, and he discouraged efforts on his behalf that would have required an admission of repentance. What he did write, to the Punjab Governor, was a demand that since the government regarded them as prisoners of a war, they should be shot by a firing squad rather than hanged as criminals. That is not a plea for mercy. It is an argument about the terms of his death.

He also wrote, in the condemned cell, that he was going with a full sense of the value of his sacrifice, and that his execution would do more for the cause than his life could. He was twenty three and he had thought it through.

Bhagat Singh was not alone and he was not the first. There is a whole parallel history running under the Congress story, and the question of what the Congress did about it is a fair one.

5The Others: Did the Congress Abandon the Revolutionaries?

The scale of it

Armed revolutionary activity ran continuously from the Bengal partition of 1905 to the late 1930s. A short list of what that actually means:

• The Ghadar movement.Founded in 1913 in San Francisco by Punjabi migrants, mostly Sikhs, it planned a general mutiny in the Indian Army in 1915. It was betrayed and crushed. Kartar Singh Sarabha was hanged at Lahore in November 1915 at the age of nineteen. Bhagat Singh kept his photograph.
• Anushilan Samiti and Jugantarin Bengal, out of which came decades of assassinations of officials, bank robberies for funds and bomb factories.
• The Kakori train action, 9 August 1925.A group robbed a train carrying government money near Kakori in the United Provinces. Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, Roshan Singh and Rajendra Lahiri were hanged in December 1927.
• The Rampa rebellion, 1922 to 1924.Alluri Sitarama Raju led a tribal armed uprising in the Godavari hills against forest laws that had destroyed a way of life. He was captured and shot in 1924.
• The Chittagong armoury raid, 18 April 1930.Surya Sen and a group including teenagers seized the armouries, cut the telegraph and held out in the hills. Pritilata Waddedar led an attack on a European club in 1932 and took poison rather than be captured. Kalpana Dutta was transported for life. Surya Sen was hanged in 1934 after being tortured.
• The young women of Bengal.Santi Ghosh and Suniti Choudhury, both schoolgirls, shot a district magistrate in December 1931. Bina Das fired at the Governor of Bengal at a university convocation in February 1932.

The Andamans

Hundreds of convicted revolutionaries were transported to the Cellular Jail at Port Blair, where solitary confinement, the oil mill and floggings were routine. The prisoners fought back with the only weapon available, which was hunger strikes, in 1933 and again in 1937. Three men died in the 1933 strike. The 1937 strike, supported by protest in India, finally led to the repatriation of the political prisoners to mainland jails.

So what did the Congress actually do?

What it did not do.It never supported armed action, and it said so at every opportunity. Gandhi condemned individual violence consistently and without exception, from 1919 to the end of his life. Congress resolutions repeatedly dissociated the organisation from acts of political violence.

What it did do, which is usually left out.Congress campaigned continuously for the release of political prisoners, including men convicted of violence, and made it a standing demand in every negotiation with the government. When the Congress ministries took office in 1937 under the Government of India Act, one of their very first acts in province after province was to release political prisoners, including revolutionaries who had been in jail for years. This produced a serious confrontation with the Governors of the United Provinces and Bihar, who tried to block the releases, and the Congress ministries offered to resign over it. They won.

That is a concrete thing, done by people who disagreed with the prisoners' methods, at real political cost.

The second betrayal charge. Unlike the first one, this charge is largely true, and the interesting question is not whether it happened but whether Gandhi was right on the substance.

6Tripuri 1939: Was Bose Pushed Out?

What happened

Bose was Congress president at Haripura in 1938 with Gandhi's support and had a good year. In January 1939 he stood for a second term. Gandhi did not want him to, and the old guard put up Dr Pattabhi Sitaramayya.

Bose won, by 1, 580 votes to 1, 377. It was a genuine election and the result was clear.

Gandhi's public response was a sentence that tells you everything about how personally he took it.

Then the machinery moved. Twelve of the fifteen members of the Congress Working Committee resigned, leaving the newly elected president with no executive. At the Tripuri session in March 1939, with Bose seriously ill and unable to attend most proceedings, Govind Ballabh Pant moved a resolution expressing confidence in the old Working Committee and requesting the president to nominate his new committeein accordance with the wishes of Gandhiji. It passed.

Read that formula again. It asked an elected president to choose his own cabinet according to the wishes of a man who held no office in the organisation at all. Gandhi had not been a member of the Congress since 1934.

Bose resigned the presidency on 29 April 1939. On 3 May 1939 he founded the Forward Bloc within the Congress. In August 1939 he was removed from the presidency of the Bengal Congress and debarred from holding any elective Congress office for three years.

Was he pushed out?

Yes. Not by a coup and not illegally, but by a coordinated refusal to serve under him which made his office unusable, followed by disciplinary action. Anyone who denies this is not reading the sequence.

It is also worth saying what kind of pushing out it was. Nobody was arrested and nothing was falsified. It was the oldest manoeuvre in organisational politics: the establishment declined to work with the winner until the winner had to leave. That is legal. It is not democratic in spirit, and the people who did it knew that.

What were they actually arguing about?

This is the part that matters more than the manoeuvring, and both positions deserve to be stated properly.

Bose's position.War in Europe was obviously coming. Britain would be at her weakest and most distracted. The Congress should therefore give the British a six month ultimatum to concede independence and, if refused, launch an all out struggle timed to Britain's crisis. India should take advantage of the enemy's difficulty, because that is what every nation in history has done.

Gandhi's position.The Congress was not organisationally ready for a mass struggle in 1939. The communal question was unresolved. Congress ministries were in office in eight provinces doing real work. And a struggle launched to exploit somebody else's catastrophe would forfeit the moral position on which the entire method rested.

Bose is quoted constantly, by people who agree with each other about nothing, and most of those quotations are never dated. Here are the ones I could verify, and one that I could not.

7What Bose Actually Said About Gandhi and About Savarkar

On Gandhi

Bose was a severe political critic of Gandhi. In his book The Indian Struggle, written in exile in the 1930s, he analysed Gandhi's leadership sharply, arguing that Gandhi repeatedly halted movements at the point of maximum pressure and lacked a strategy for the final seizure of power.

And then there is this, from Azad Hind Radio on 6 July 1944, broadcast while Bose was leading an army against the British and Gandhi was in India having just been released from detention.

Think about what that means. The title that Gandhi is known by in India was given to him by the man who is usually presented as his greatest enemy, in the middle of a war, from a radio station in Southeast Asia.

Both things are true at once. Bose thought Gandhi's strategy was wrong and said so in print for a decade. Bose also regarded him as the father of the nation and asked for his blessing. Political disagreement and personal reverence are not contradictory, and every account that keeps only one half is misleading you.

On Savarkar

This one is genuinely surprising and I want to give it accurately, because it cuts against what most people on both sides expect.

In a broadcast on 25 June 1944, Bose praised Savarkar. His reason was entirely practical. Savarkar was urging Indian young men to enlist in the British Indian Army, which the Congress condemned. Bose's point was that those recruits were exactly the trained soldiers who could later be captured and turned into his own Indian National Army, which is precisely what had happened at Singapore in 1942.

Two things must be said about this quotation, and both matter.

First, it is real and it should not be explained away by people who find it uncomfortable. Bose said it, on the record, and it is directly relevant to the charge examined in Part 6 that Savarkar's recruitment drive was collaboration with the British. Bose, the man leading an army against the British, thought that recruitment was useful to him.

Second, it should not be inflated by people who find it convenient. This is a statement about military recruitment, not an endorsement of Hindu nationalism. Bose was a lifelong opponent of communal politics. His Forward Bloc criticised the Hindu Mahasabha. He built the Indian National Army deliberately across religion, with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh officers eating together and a chain of command that ignored community, and his political vision for India was explicitly secular. A man can praise an opponent's recruitment campaign because it serves his war and still reject that opponent's politics entirely.

The INA lost every significant battle it fought. It also did more damage to British rule than any Indian military force since 1857. Both statements are true, and the resolution of that paradox is one of the most important things in this book.

8The Indian National Army and What It Really Achieved

The journey

Bose was placed under house arrest in Calcutta and escaped in January 1941, travelling in disguise through Peshawar to Kabul, then on to Moscow and Berlin. He spent two years in Germany, raised a small Indian Legion from prisoners of war, and got little from Hitler beyond politeness. In 1943 he transferred by German submarine to a Japanese one off Madagascar and reached Southeast Asia.

The Indian National Army already existed, formed from Indian prisoners taken at Singapore in 1942 largely through the work of Mohan Singh and Rash Behari Bose. It had collapsed once in disputes with the Japanese. Bose took command on 4 July 1943 and rebuilt it. On 21 October 1943 he proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India, which was recognised by the Axis powers and which formally declared war on Britain and the United States.

He also raised the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, an all women combat unit under Captain Lakshmi Sahgal. There was nothing like it anywhere in the world at that time.

The military record

In 1944 the INA advanced with the Japanese into north east India, reaching Moirang in Manipur and taking part in the battles of Imphal and Kohima. Those battles were a catastrophe for the Japanese and for the INA. Supply lines failed, the monsoon arrived, disease and starvation destroyed units, and the retreat was appalling. By mid 1945 the INA had effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force.

Judged as a military campaign, it failed completely.

What it actually did

The decisive effect came after the shooting stopped, and it came from a British mistake.

In November 1945 the British put three INA officers on trial for treason at the Red Fort in Delhi. They chose, for reasons of even handedness, one Hindu, one Muslim and one Sikh: Prem Sahgal, Shah Nawaz Khan and Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon.

The effect was the opposite of what was intended. The trials became the largest political event in India since 1942. The Congress formed a defence committee that included Jawaharlal Nehru, who put on his barrister's robes for the first time in twenty five years, alongside Bhulabhai Desai, Asaf Ali and Tej Bahadur Sapru. The Muslim League also defended them. For a few months in 1945 and 1946, the entire spectrum of Indian politics was united behind men who had taken up arms against the British Empire, and enormous crowds demonstrated in every major city.

And the men in the dock were soldiers. That is what changed everything. The British had ruled India for nearly two centuries on the loyalty of the Indian Army, as Part 1 explained. Now Indian soldiers were national heroes for having fought against it, and serving Indian soldiers were watching the trials.

In February 1946 came the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, when ratings at Bombay and elsewhere revolted, and Indian officials in Whitehall and Delhi began writing to each other about whether the instruments of British rule could still be relied on.

Here is the honest state of the evidence, with nothing added and nothing removed.

9What Happened to Bose

The official account

On 18 August 1945, three days after Japan's surrender, a Japanese bomber carrying Bose crashed shortly after taking off from Taihoku, now Taipei, in Japanese occupied Taiwan. He suffered severe burns and died in a military hospital the same day. His ashes were later taken to the Renkoji temple in Tokyo, where they remain.

The four inquiries What is genuinely unexplained

Being fair here means admitting that the conspiracy theories did not come from nowhere. Two things are odd and are documented.

• The surveillance.Declassified files confirm that Indian intelligence kept the families of Bose's relatives under surveillance for many years after 1945, into the late 1960s. Nobody has produced a satisfying explanation for watching the relatives of a man the state insists died in 1945.
• The remains.The ashes at Renkoji temple have never been subjected to DNA testing, despite decades of requests, and successive Indian governments of different parties have not resolved the matter.

And being fair also means saying that no verifiable evidence has ever been produced for any of the alternative stories, including the long running claim that a recluse in Uttar Pradesh known as Gumnami Baba was Bose. That claim was examined and not established.

Where We Have Reached

Two men, two methods, two quarrels with Gandhi, and two accusations that have outlived everybody involved.

On Bhagat Singh, the popular charge collapses on contact with the documents. Gandhi appealed at least four times, in writing, including on the morning of the execution. The pact never covered men convicted of violence. Only the Viceroy could commute, and the Viceroy had London behind him and a special tribunal created by ordinance to make sure the outcome was not disturbed. The charge that survives is a narrower one: Gandhi asked, and did not insist, at the only moment in his life when insisting might have been possible.

On Bose, the charge substantially stands. He was elected and then squeezed out by people who would not serve under him, and then debarred. Gandhi's judgement on the substance was defensible and his method was not.

What both stories share is more important than either. Both men believed the Congress under Gandhi would stop short of the final step, and both were arguing about the same question: when the British are weak, do you strike, or do you keep your hands clean?

That question is about to be answered, because the war Bose predicted arrives, and Part 6 is about what everybody in India did during it. The Congress in jail. The Muslim League growing. The Hindu Mahasabha in coalition governments. The RSS deciding what kind of organisation it was. Savarkar recruiting for the British Army. And three million dead in Bengal.

• Bhagat Singh,Why I Am an Atheist, October 1930, and To Young Political Workers, 2 February 1931, together with his 1928 writings on communal riots. Collected in various editions of his complete writings and available online.
• Judgement of the special tribunal in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, 7 October 1930, and the ordinance of 1 May 1930 constituting it.
• Gandhi's correspondence with Lord Irwin, February and March 1931, including the letter of 23 March 1931, in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
• Gandhi, statement in Young India, 11 June 1931, on his efforts for commutation.
• Text of the Gandhi Irwin Pact, 5 March 1931.
• Resolution of the Karachi session of the Indian National Congress, March 1931.
• Records of the Congress presidential election of January 1939 and of the Tripuri session, March 1939, including the Pant resolution.
• Records of the Kakori conspiracy case, the Chittagong armoury raid and the Ghadar trials, and accounts of the Cellular Jail hunger strikes of 1933 and 1937.
• Correspondence between the Congress provincial ministries and the Governors of the United Provinces and Bihar over the release of political prisoners, 1937 and 1938.
• Subhas Chandra Bose,The Indian Struggle, for his assessment of Gandhi's leadership.
• Selected Speeches of Subhas Chandra Bose, including the Azad Hind Radio message to Gandhi of 6 July 1944.
• Azad Hind Radio broadcast of 25 June 1944 on recruitment and Savarkar.
• Report of the Shah Nawaz Committee, 1956; Report of the Khosla Commission, 1970; Report of the Justice M. K. Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry, 2005, and the Government of India's action taken response rejecting it.
• Files on Subhas Chandra Bose declassified by the Government of India in 2015 and 2016, and the Ministry of Home Affairs reply under the Right to Information Act, May 2017.