Bhagat Singh to students
On his birth anniversary, it is fitting to recall not only the image of Bhagat Singh walking to the gallows, but also his voice, his message
Bhagat Singh had entered politics as a teenager — impatient, impulsive, and drawn to the drama of conspiracy. By 1929, in jail and surrounded by comrades, he had grown into a thinker who could look beyond the immediacy of action.
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Bhagat Singh is remembered as the young man who flung a bomb in the Central Assembly, who walked calmly to the gallows, and who turned defiance into legend. Yet there was another Bhagat Singh, less often recalled — the thinker who measured the limits of violence, the strategist who recognised the strength of mass action, the writer who drafted a future in words.
Among his scattered writings, his Message to the Punjab Students’ Conference, delivered on October 19, 1929, stands apart. It was read aloud to the gathering by Subhas Chandra Bose, who presided over the conference held at Bradlaugh Hall, Lahore. This brief text, framed as a “wireless message” from Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt, reveals a turning point in his thought: a shift from armed militancy to a vision of mass political mobilisation rooted in socialist ideals.
“Today, we cannot ask the youth to take to pistols and bombs,” the message begins. The sentence is startling in its candour, coming from a man who only months earlier had carried out the Assembly bombing and had stood unrepentant in court. But this was not a renunciation of revolution. It was a sober recognition that sporadic acts of violence could not carry the weight of a national movement. Bhagat Singh had seen how the assassination of Saunders, though dramatic, had not stirred the masses beyond outrage. He had seen how the Assembly bombs, designed as a protest, could at best awaken but not organise. The hour demanded a different approach.
With the Congress preparing to demand complete independence at its forthcoming Lahore session, Bhagat Singh understood that the stage of Indian politics was shifting. In this moment, he chose to urge students to adopt a more arduous and more enduring role — that of educators, organisers, and torchbearers of revolutionary consciousness.
For Bhagat Singh, independence was never to be defined by the mere withdrawal of British rule. “A revolution that will bring freedom and would render exploitation of man by man impossible,” the message declared. Here, in one phrase, lies the mature Bhagat Singh: nationalist, socialist, and humanist. His was not the dream of a flag replacing a flag. It was the abolition of all forms of exploitation — imperialist, capitalist, feudal, and casteist. The words echo unmistakably of Marxist thought, but they are also grounded in India’s own reality, in the villages and slums where millions lived in poverty.
To him, a struggle that ended with the transfer of power to a new Indian elite would be no liberation at all. True freedom meant economic justice, social equality, and a republic built on solidarity. That vision, he told the youth, was their responsibility to carry forward.
The students, he argued, must become the channels through which this revolutionary message flowed. “The youth have to convey the message of revolution to the farthest corner of the country, to the sweating millions in factories, slums, and village huts.” The appeal is remarkable not only for its breadth but also for its clarity. It was not addressed to leaders or notables, nor to the educated elite alone, but to those living in “worn-out cottages” and “industrial slums”. Bhagat Singh was redefining the very constituency of politics: the poor, the workers, the peasants. And it was the educated youth, with their relative freedom and access, who were charged with the task of awakening them.
The revolution was to be built not on isolated conspiracies, but on the slow, patient, and disciplined work of consciousness-raising.
In making this appeal, Bhagat Singh also turned to his own province. “The Punjab is considered politically backward,” he admitted. Rather than bask in the martial pride of his homeland, he asked its students to confront the stigma of inertia and prove it false. Responsibility, he reminded them, was not distributed evenly by geography; it had to be assumed. And to give flesh to this responsibility, he invoked the fresh memory of Jatindra Nath Das, who had died only weeks earlier after a 63-day hunger strike in Lahore Jail.
“Following the glorious example of our great martyr Jatindra Nath Das,” he urged, let the youth rise with fortitude and firmness. Das’ sacrifice was not to be mourned in silence but to be translated into action. In that moment, Bhagat Singh turned martyrdom into pedagogy, grief into fuel for organised struggle.
What emerges from this brief message is not just an exhortation but a political doctrine. Students were not to be mere demonstrators or temporary recruits to a nationalist cause. They were to be the vanguard of an ideological movement, tasked with spreading socialist consciousness, organising the dispossessed, and shaping the moral compass of the nation.
Bhagat Singh’s tone is not romantic, nor is it sentimental. It is instructive, precise, and demanding. He does not flatter the youth; he burdens them. He does not call for blind sacrifice; he calls for clarity of thought, discipline, and political responsibility.
Bhagat Singh had entered politics as a teenager — impatient, impulsive, and drawn to the drama of conspiracy. By 1929, in jail and surrounded by comrades, he had grown into a thinker who could look beyond the immediacy of action. His subsequent essays — on atheism, on the meaning of revolution, on the tasks of young political workers — would deepen this philosophical turn. But already here, in this message, we see him moving from passion to purpose, from the romance of violence to the architecture of social transformation.
The Tribune, in its October 22, 1929, report on the conference, noted: “The president then read the following message which he said the conference had received by wireless from Bhagat Singh and Mr Batukeshwar Dutt.” How the message could have been transmitted “by wireless” from revolutionaries confined in jail is a puzzle. More likely, it was a rhetorical flourish or a device to dramatise its arrival. But the fiction itself is revealing. It suggests how the figure of Bhagat Singh had already become larger than life — his words expected to leap over prison walls, to travel invisibly across airwaves, to speak to youth as if by direct communion. Myth was being woven even as history unfolded.
He glorified not death, but purpose. His revolution was not merely against colonial rule, but against injustice itself.
— The writer is an author and publisher
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