They respected him for his impact on the masses and asked revolutionaries to learn from his connectivity to the masses. They wrote clearly that there will be no stable disciple of the ‘Sant of Sabarmati’. What did Bhagat Singh think about the Gandhian movement?īhagat Singh and his comrades thought that the Gandhian movement will end up in compromise, without achieving much. This is the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi. In fact, in a 1924 essay, Bhagat Singh took the Indian idea of vasudhaiva kutumbakam (the world as family) and visualised a world federation of the future. While he remained a staunch nationalist, there was a qualitative difference in that his nationalism contained the seeds of the socialist revolution of peasants and workers, which had no contradiction with international revolutionary movements. Due to continuous study of world revolutionary movements, especially Irish revolutionary and Bolshevik movements, Bhagat Singh’s ideas developed further. Their revolutionary struggle began from the fight against British colonialism, from the formation of HRA in 1924, in which Chandrashekhar Azad, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaquallah and Bhagat Singh were part. The addition of the word ‘socialist’ to the existing organisation was a qualitative advancement in the revolutionaries’ thought process. The process of Bhagat Singh developing as a Marxist revolutionary began with the setting up of Naujawan Bharat Sabha and the later rechristening of HRA (Hindustan Republican Army) as Hindustan Socialist Republican Army/Association. How do we reconcile his nationalism with Marxist internationalism? Historian Chaman Lal, who put together Singh’s lesser known intellectual output, unpacks his beliefs on the eve of his birth anniversary in a conversation with Manimugdha S Sharma.īhagat Singh was a Marxist revolutionary. His mystique to this day remains almost unmatched and even some Pakistani organisations hail him as a hero. Bhagat Singh, a freedom fighter who belonged to the revolutionary strand, was executed in 1931 at the age of 23.
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