The last defiance of Bhagat Singh and his comrades

Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru remain among the most luminous names in India’s struggle for freedom. Bhagat Singh, born in 1907 into a politically conscious Sikh family in Punjab, emerged in his early twenties as the most articulate voice of revolutionary nationalism, combining daring action with rare intellectual depth. Sukhdev Thapar, his close comrade from Lahore, was the disciplined organiser behind much of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association’s work in north India. Shivaram Hari Rajguru, the youngest of the three, was remembered by contemporaries for his courage, marksmanship, and unwavering loyalty to the revolutionary cause. On 23 March 1931, all three were executed in Lahore Central Jail. Their martyrdom transformed them into enduring figures in India’s political memory.

Among the many documents associated with their final days, one stands apart with unusual force: the demand that they should not be hanged like criminals but shot like soldiers. This text is generally believed to be a single letter written by Bhagat Singh and his comrades shortly before their execution. A closer examination of the historical record, however, suggests that it emerged through two related communications written in the last weeks before their death-one addressed to the Jail Superintendent and another to the Governor of Punjab.

The first communication appears to have been addressed to the Jail Superintendent, the immediate authority through whom prisoners were required to communicate with higher officials. In it, the revolutionaries made an argument that was both simple and devastating. They had been convicted under the charge of waging war against the King-Emperor. If that charge was to be taken seriously, they argued, they could not be treated as ordinary criminals. They were political combatants engaged in a struggle between an enslaved nation and an imperial power. As such, they should be treated as soldiers and executed by firing squad. This was not theatrical rhetoric. It was a deliberate political intervention. By invoking the very language used by the colonial tribunal, Bhagat Singh and his comrades turned the logic of the state against itself. If the state insisted that they had waged war, it had already admitted the political nature of their actions.

The second and better-known letter, addressed to the Governor of Punjab, carried this argument further. Here, the revolutionaries made their position unmistakable. They did not beg for pardon. They did not seek commutation of their sentence. Instead, they demanded that the British government recognise the political character of their struggle and treat them accordingly. Their demand was stark: if they were to die, they should die as soldiers, not criminals.

The distinction mattered enormously. Hanging was the punishment reserved for criminals and murderers. Execution by firing squad was traditionally associated with war. By demanding the latter, Bhagat Singh and his comrades refused the moral vocabulary the colonial state wished to impose upon them.

They would not accept the label of criminal. They insisted on defining themselves as participants in a political struggle. In that act of self-definition, the letter rose far above its immediate context. It became a manifesto. The timing of these communications is crucial. March 1931 was a moment of uncertainty and political negotiation. The Gandhi-Irwin Pact had just been signed. It secured the release of many prisoners involved in the Civil Disobedience Movement and appeared to promise a temporary settlement between the Congress and the colonial state.

But revolutionaries convicted in violent cases were excluded from its provisions. This exclusion reflected a hierarchy that was emerging within the freedom struggle itself. Certain forms of resistance were being legitimised while others were being quietly disowned. Some patriots could be accommodated within the political mainstream; others were left outside its boundaries.

Bhagat Singh and his comrades clearly understood this. Their letter must therefore be read not only against the colonial judiciary but also against the shifting political climate within the nationalist movement. It was written at a moment when compromise was increasingly being treated as political wisdom.

The revolutionaries responded with an ethics of refusal. They would not ask for mercy. They would not dilute the meaning of their struggle. And they would not allow either the colonial state or sections of the nationalist leadership to narrate their deaths as the punishment of criminals. What is striking about the document is its composure. It is not an emotional farewell. It is precise, disciplined, and politically clear. Even at the threshold of execution, the revolutionaries were concerned less with death than with how their struggle would be understood. The legal intelligence of their argument is remarkable. Colonial power had used the charge of waging war to justify exemplary punishment. Bhagat Singh and his comrades seized that very charge and exposed its contradiction.  

If the state itself admitted the political nature of their action, it could not simultaneously degrade them into ordinary criminals fit for the hangman’s noose.In doing so, the revolutionaries transformed the tribunal’s language into a weapon of counter-argument. Few episodes in India’s anti-colonial history illustrate more clearly how insurgent politics could appropriate the vocabulary of power and turn it into an instrument of dissent.

The authenticity of these communications is also supported by contemporary evidence. Several early publications record that the letter was transmitted through the Jail Superintendent, as required by prison procedure. More importantly, the colonial state itself acknowledged its existence. During proceedings before the Lahore High Court on 23 March 1931, Government Advocate Carden Noad stated that the prisoners had not submitted mercy petitions in the conventional sense but had instead sent a petition demanding to be shot rather than hanged.This acknowledgment is significant. It shows that the revolutionaries’ defiance was formally recorded within the colonial legal system itself.

In this sense, the colonial archive becomes an unintended witness to revolutionary assertion. The prison, the court, and the bureaucracy were meant to suppress dissent. Yet they also became sites where the revolutionaries inserted their own words and categories into the official record. The aftermath of the executions only strengthened the power of their intervention. On the evening of 23 March 1931, the three revolutionaries were executed in secrecy and their bodies disposed of hurriedly in an attempt to avoid public unrest. Yet the intended effect of deterrence failed. Their deaths electrified the imagination of the country.

The cry of Inquilab Zindabad, their courage in court, their historic hunger strike and their final insistence on a soldier’s death rather than a criminal’s execution fused into a single image of revolutionary dignity.

In the decades after independence, that image endured, though often stripped of its ideological sharpness. Official nationalism found it easier to celebrate Bhagat Singh the martyr than Bhagat Singh the thinker. His socialism, his critique of inequality, and his impatience with political compromise were frequently softened or ignored.Yet the final letter resists such domestication. It insists on being read politically.

It reminds us that Bhagat Singh did not sacrifice his life merely for a transfer of power. He envisioned a deeper transformation of society and refused, even in death, to allow the meaning of the struggle to be narrowed. Nearly a century after 23 March 1931, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru continue to live in the conscience of the nation. But memory alone is not enough.

Their legacy demands reading rather than ritual, engagement rather than reverence. The demand “Do not hang us, shoot us” was not simply a farewell. It was a declaration of political dignity and a challenge to every generation that inherits the freedom they helped win.

As the nation observes Martyrs’ Day on 23 March, we should remember them not only with emotion but with understanding. The greatest tribute India can offer Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru is to preserve the courage of their convictions-the belief that freedom must always be accompanied by justice, equality, and fearless truth.Their voices were meant to be silenced by the gallows. Instead, they became part of the moral foundation of the Republic.

The writer is an author and historian; views are personal