It has been 94 years since Bhagat Singh and his comrades Sukhdev and Rajguru were executed in Lahore jail a day ahead of the scheduled hour of execution. Since then he is remembered by the Urdu epithet Shaheed-e-Azam (greatest martyr, or martyr of martyrs). Inquilab Zindabad (long live revolution), the slogan, again in Urdu, immortalised by Bhagat Singh, is daily invoked across India as the most popular chant of collective resolve for change and justice. When nine decades later today the BJP Chief Minister of India's most populous province Uttar Pradesh contemptuously describes the same Urdu language as a language of fanaticism, we can easily sense why Bhagat Singh sounds so contemporary and remains so relevant.
Bhagat Singh personified youth, and at the same time he was one of colonial India's most mature minds and a farsighted visionary. It was not just the passionate urge for freedom from colonialism that drove Bhagat Singh and his comrades in their great sacrifice, they were driven by the dream of a socialist India. India's freedom movement was a great national awakening that not only aroused and united millions of Indians to free India from the shackles of colonial rule but also shaped the vision of modern India in the course of that national upheaval. On both these counts Bhagat Singh was a freedom-fighter par excellence. Bhagat Singh and his comrades shaped the political imagination and ideological conviction which informed the Constitution of India proclaiming India as a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic with comprehensive justice, liberty, equality and fraternity for all, drafted under stewardship of Babasaheb Ambedkar.
We also remember Bhagat Singh for his prophetic warning that freedom must not be reduced to merely an act of swapping, of replacing the white English rulers with their brown sahib successors. For him the chant Inquilab Zindabad was completed only with the call to defeat imperialism - samrajyvad murdabad. Clearly, he was mobilising India not just in the immediate context of freedom from the shackles of British colonial rule, he was also sowing the future seeds of struggle in a world marked by imperialist domination and in a context of possible complicity and capitulation by future Indian rulers. In so doing, he was playing precisely the distinct communist role underlined by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto: "The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement."
Today when the Trump administration humiliates and hurts India in every possible way and the Modi government justifies the American action, remember Bhagat Singh. When Netanyahu goes on killing innocent Palestinian children and their parents in a never-ending genocide, Trump persecutes every voice of freedom, justice and peace and the Modi government not only keeps quiet but also lends all possible support to this genocidal campaign, remember Bhagat Singh. When Adani grabs India's natural resources and infrastructural facilities in every sphere, gets internationally exposed and charged for his corrupt ways and criminal wrongdoings and Modi brushes it aside as a 'personal matter', remember Bhagat Singh. And remember Bhagat Singh when Mohan Bhagwat describes the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya as the moment of India's true independence. The courage, determination and ideological clarity that Bhagat Singh and his comrades brought to India's freedom movement a century ago is a permanent asset for we the people of India. It helped us in winning freedom in 1947. It will also energise us in our current battle for freedom from imperialist domination and fascist aggression, from corporate plunder and communal hate. Inquilab Zindabad! Samrajyavad murdabad!
