In 30 Seconds
Story
On 8 April 1929, as the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi prepared to hear the Viceroy certify into law the Public Safety Bill the elected house had rejected, two young men rose in the visitors’ gallery and threw two bombs onto the empty floor below, followed by a shower of red leaflets and the cry that became a generation’s slogan, Inquilab Zindabad, long live revolution. The bombs, built low of explosive by design, wounded a few members slightly and killed no one, which was the point. It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear, the leaflet began, quoting a French martyr, and the throwers, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt, made no attempt to escape, standing amid the smoke to be arrested, for the operation’s target was never the chamber. It was the courtroom that must follow, and the country listening beyond it.
The strategy was the HSRA’s doctrine of the propaganda of the deed carried to its logical refinement, the deed reduced to symbol, the propaganda made the substance. Bhagat Singh, already wanted for the Saunders shooting and choosing, over his comrades’ resistance, to spend himself on the public stage, understood that a trial gives the accused what the Raj allowed nowhere else, a platform whose every word the press could print as court record, and the Assembly case of 1929 was conducted by the defendants as an address to the nation. Their joint statement to the sessions court remains the movement’s manifesto in miniature, the bombs thrown to protest a legislature that mocked representation, force so used distinguished from force in aggression, revolution defined not as the cult of pistol and bomb but as the ending of the exploitation of man by man, an order in which the sovereignty of the toilers would be recognised. Sentenced to transportation for life in June, the two had already succeeded, and the government, understanding as much, resolved that the sequel would not be permitted to repeat the performance.
The sequel was the Lahore Conspiracy Case, the mass trial for the Saunders killing and the association’s operations that gathered Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru and their comrades through 1929 and 1930, and it became a duel over the trial’s own terms. The prisoners’ weapon was the hunger strike, begun in June 1929 to demand the treatment of political prisoners, books, newspapers, the dignity the empire granted its European convicts and denied its Indian rebels, and it produced the year’s great martyrdom. Jatindra Nath Das, the Bengal revolutionary who had joined the fast against his own judgment of its worth and then outlasted every man in it, refused food for sixty three days and died in Borstal jail on 13 September 1929, his funeral train across northern India met at every station by multitudes, Subhas Bose leading the vast Calcutta procession, the legislature echoing with the government’s shame. The strikes won their substance in committee concessions, and the trial ground on, the accused answering its authority with slogans and songs until the ordinary court’s proceedings became impossible, whereupon the government dispensed with ordinary courts. The Viceroy’s ordinance of May 1930 created a special tribunal of three judges empowered to try the case in the accused’s absence, without jury and without appeal save to the Privy Council, an instrument that expired with its single use, and before it, boycotted by the defendants after its lathis had beaten them in the dock itself, the case concluded. On 7 October 1930 the tribunal delivered its judgment, transportation for the many, and for Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, death.
The five months between sentence and gallows completed the design. The condemned cell became the movement’s study, the letters and essays flowing out, the country’s petitions flowing uselessly in, and the trial’s record, printed and reprinted, carried the ideas into every reading room in India, precisely as the gallery’s bombs had intended. The government had refused the defendants an escape it was never asked for and granted them the amplification they sought, the special tribunal’s very lawlessness certifying their indictment of the system, and when the end came, on the evening of 23 March 1931, the deaf, as the leaflet had promised, had heard. What they had heard, the next chapter tells.
