08 April, 2026 – Chandigarh : Ninety-seven years ago today, a 20-year-old Indian revolutionary walked into the Central Legislative Assembly in New Delhi, threw two non-lethal smoke bombs into the chamber and stood his ground. He did not run. He raised the slogan “Inquilab Zindabad!” and surrendered–choosing the courtroom over escape, so that his voice and his cause could reach every corner of a colonised country.
That act of April 8, 1929, when Bhagat Singh and his comrade Batukeshwar Dutt hurled bombs specifically engineered to create noise rather than casualties–their stated purpose being to make the “deaf ears” of the British administration hear the voice of Indian youth–set in motion a chain of events that would end on the gallows of Lahore Central Jail on March 23, 1931. He was 23.
On the 97th anniversary of that surrender, 165 files locked inside a heavily guarded civil secretariat in Lahore–examined for the first time by Professor Satvinder S Juss of King’s College, London, who travelled to Lahore over 2017-20 to dig deep into the Pakistan archives–have yielded disclosures never seen before. The files not only revealed a revolutionary, but a man of rare intellectual depth, legal brilliance, poetic sensibility and extraordinary moral courage.
Bhagat Singh’s story begins with the shooting in December 1928 of British police officer John Saunders in Lahore–retaliation for the fatal lathicharge on Lala Lajpat Rai. Bhagat Singh’s group plastered posters across the city claiming responsibility. The posters were signed in Bhagat Singh’s name. What they said has lain buried in the Lahore files for nearly a century.
Prof Juss found the poster, which stated: “We are sorry to admit that we who attach so great a sanctity to human life, we who dream of a glorious future, when man will be enjoying perfect peace and full liberty, have been forced to shed human blood.”
As he read those words, Prof Juss told The Tribune over the phone from London, he was “stopped dead in his tracks by the literary quality of these words”. “How many people today in India are able to write like this? How many even in the West can produce something of this poetic quality, this lyricism, that goes straight to the heart? That was utterly remarkable.”
Hunger strike films never explained
Every film and popular account of Bhagat Singh mentions his hunger strike in prison. None has explained what it was actually about–because the answer lay in the files.
When Bhagat Singh and his associates were held as undertrials, the British administration denied them access to newspapers as well as a proper diet. Under the jail rules of the time, any literate undertrial was entitled to one daily newspaper–The Tribune, if they read English, or a vernacular paper in their own language. This right was being withheld for Bhagat Singh.
According to Prof Juss, Bhagat Singh’s group declared they would not attend court, but go on hunger strike until the right was restored. Their demand was not about comfort, but about identity–the insistence that they were political prisoners fighting for their country, not common criminals to be stripped of rights. “There is tremendous nobility and dignity in this. Bhagat Singh and his friends were asserting their identity as freedom fighters, not common criminals, right from within the prison cell,” Prof Juss said.
The same conviction drove their demand regarding execution. They refused to be hanged. Hanging, they argued, was for criminals. As political prisoners, they were entitled to be shot. They held to that position to the end.
The files also record that on February 19, 1930, the government issued a press communique introducing new jail classification rules, dividing prisoners into categories A, B and C. Category A–the most favoured–was reserved for non-habitual prisoners of good character, education, social standing and what the rules called “habit of life”. The phrase was colonial code for prisoners who were Anglicised or Anglophile in their ways–a system designed, in effect, to reward collaboration with the occupier.
Legal masterstroke
Perhaps the most significant disclosure in the files is one that only a legally trained eye could have caught. Prof Juss believes he is the first person to have done so.
When Bhagat Singh’s case was transferred from the magistrate’s court to a specially constituted three-member tribunal–an extraordinary measure taken outside the normal judicial process–the accused refused to recognise its authority.
In handwritten documents now preserved in the files and never previously examined, they stated that they did not wish to “take any part in the proceedings of this case, because we do not recognise this government to be based on justice established by law”.
The distinction, Prof Juss explained, was constitutionally devastating. “They did not say the government was not based on justice. They said it was not based on justice according to law. Using English law itself–the very law the British had taught Indians–they were arguing that this special tribunal, set up at the whim of the Governor General outside the established courts, had no jurisdiction to try them. And if it had no jurisdiction, any sentence it passed was a nullity. It was unlawful. I think I am largely the only person, because of my training as a lawyer, who has been able to pick this up. Nobody else has,” he added.
The argument was legally sound, mounted by the accused themselves, from a prison cell, turning the tools of colonial law against the colonial state.
Building where it all happened
During one of his visits, Prof Juss walked out of the Anarkali civil secretariat and asked a question that had apparently never been formally answered: Where exactly did the Special Tribunal convene to try the Lahore conspiracy case?
Nobody in the area knew. He asked around, inquired further afield and eventually found it by driving through the city. It was Poonch House–named after the Maharaja of Poonch, and at the time functioning as a Revenue Department office. Outside the building, still intact, was a marble plaque in Urdu confirming that the Lahore conspiracy case was heard there in 1930. “No one knew where this building was,” said Prof Juss. Since his discovery, the Pakistan government–recognising its historic and tourism value–has refurbished the rooms, repainted the building and documented its significance.
Archive nobody opened: 165 files, not 135
For decades, it was believed that around 135 files on the Bhagat Singh case existed somewhere in the Lahore archives. As late as 2011, Professor Chaman Lal, a dean at Jawaharlal Nehru University, was urging someone go and examine them.
Celebrated journalist Kuldip Nayar had tried and failed. Author William Dalrymple had described the Punjab civil secretariat at Anarkali–guarded by army personnel with machine guns–as next to impossible to enter.
Prof Juss wrote to the authorities. They did not reply. He went anyway. “I knocked on the door and said ‘I am from London and I want to look at these documents’. They welcomed me with open arms,” he said.
Archive director Abbas Chuktai, himself deeply interested in Bhagat Singh, seated the professor in his own office, personally brought out the files and spent hours working through each one alongside him. The count confounded every prior estimate: not 135 files, but 165–30 more than the world had known about.
The files carry gallery admission passes for Bhagat Singh’s trial, naming those who came to watch. “His two aunts were there in that gallery–both had lost their husbands to the freedom struggle and were left childless. That is also why Bhagat Singh himself never married,” said Prof Juss. “And alongside them was Baba Gurdit Singh of the Komagata Maru ship–the man who had defied the British Empire a generation earlier. Their attendance passes are right there in the files. It tells you everything about the kind of movement this young man had become the centre of.”
The files also bear on the disputed location of the hanging. Shadman Chowk is widely cited as the site of the old Central Jail, demolished in 1965. The documents, examined by Chuktai and Prof Juss together, suggested the precise location required closer scrutiny.
All 165 files are now catalogued at the back of Prof Juss’s first book, The Execution of Bhagat Singh–the first such public record in existence. “It simply requires somebody to go back and go through these documents the way I did. I have been able to break the ice,” he said.
Man inside the cell
Bhagat Singh founded the Naujawan Bharat Sabha in March 1926 at the age of 18. Two years earlier, he had joined the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army. His entire active life, from 1924 to his execution in 1931, lasted just seven years–the last two spent in prison. “His entire period of activism was only seven years–from 1924, when he set up the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army, to the time he was hanged in 1931,” said Prof Juss. “How many leaders alive today can boast of such an achievement in such short a time?”
In that cell, a librarian named Shashtri from the Dwarkadas Library in Lahore–associated with the Servants of the People Society–smuggled books to him at personal risk. The reading list was vast: Marx, Engels and Trotsky; Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Jefferson; Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky; Bertrand Russell; and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and Omar Khayyam. “Those who ridicule him forget that he was only 23 years old,” said Prof Juss. “How many in modern India today have the broad span of knowledge that he had? He was able to do that because prison librarian Shashtri smuggled books out for him.”
From that cell, Bhagat Singh produced over 130 documents–more than 400 pages of letters, court statements, pamphlets, essays and sketches. Many have still not been recovered. Still fewer have been read.
He was, Prof Juss argued, the intellectual forerunner of every major modern rights movement. “If you read his writings, you see that he is the intellectual forerunner of all modern rights movements–both Franz Fanon and Black Lives Matter,” he said.
Bhagat Singh could have lived, Prof Juss added. Gandhi was negotiating with Viceroy Lord Irwin at the very moment the execution date was fixed. A word could have commuted the sentence. The word was never spoken. “My grandfather would say how the death of this young man could have been avoided if only Gandhi had taken a stand with Viceroy Lord Irwin, but he chose not to. And so this poor young lad was hanged at just 23,” recalled Prof Juss, whose childhood in a Punjab village without electricity was lit by his grandfather’s late-night accounts of the freedom struggle.
Pakistan’s memory for a hero
Nothing in this research surprised Prof Juss more than what he found beyond the archive–the depth and spontaneity of Pakistan’s feeling for Bhagat Singh.
Every year on March 23, crowds gather at Shadman Chowk in Lahore–singing, reciting poems passed down through generations, raising slogans. The Punjab government of Pakistan has passed a resolution to rename it Bhagat Singh Chowk. “The only thing that prevents Bhagat Singh’s complete rehabilitation as an icon of freedom in Pakistan are the forces of religious extremism,” said Prof Juss. “Otherwise, the people of that land recognise the greatness he embodies even today.” The religious right has fought the renaming through the Lahore High Court since 2013.
A stranger Prof Juss met outside Lahore, on learning of the research, took him home, fed him a meal and recited a poem about Bhagat Singh that his forefathers had passed down across generations. “How many families in India today can boast the same,” asked Prof Juss.
This reverence had struck him even before he reached Lahore. When he visited the Pakistan High Commission in London to apply for his research visa, the High Commissioner’s response was instantaneous: “Sardarji, Bhagat Singh ta sada hero hai. Fikar na karo–you will get the visa.” He issued a year’s visa on the spot.
The hold Bhagat Singh has on Pakistan’s popular imagination is also rooted in a political vacuum. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was once the country’s only mainstream champion of the poor and of religious minorities–until he yielded to religious pressure in 1974 and legislated the Ahmadis as apostates. That image was shattered and never repaired. “That void that he left behind has been filled by Bhagat Singh,” said Prof. Juss. “The common man identifies with him–with what the future of the subcontinent should have looked like after Independence–like no other.”
In India, the story gets more complex. When the Congress came to power, the Gandhi-Nehru narrative crowded out the agrarian revolutionaries who had lived and died on the land. “He is the only person who alone unites the people of India and Pakistan,” said Prof Juss. “He alone among the leaders of the Independence movement was prepared to die for his country. Not Gandhi, not Nehru, and certainly not the Muslim League.”
The world Bhagat Singh wrote about–rising authoritarianism, shrinking freedoms, the poor and marginalised crushed by systems that serve the powerful–is more recognisable today. “Bhagat Singh speaks about the plight of the oppressed and the downtrodden today just as he did between 1924 and 1931,” said Prof Juss. “Do Indians know their history,” asked Prof Juss. “Only if they know their history can they truly begin to own it.”
The Tribune