Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev: The Wrong Man, the Bombs That Missed and the Gallows a Day Early

A few days after the firing stopped at Jallianwala Bagh in April 1919, a schoolboy from Lyallpur district walked into the walled garden in Amritsar. The bullet marks were fresh on the bricks. He scooped up earth darkened with blood, and pressed it into a small glass bottle.

His name was Bhagat Singh, and he was 11 (some accounts say 10, others 12). He took the bottle home. As the journalist P. Sainath tells it, he and his sister emptied it at a spot in their grandfather’s garden and grew flowers there every year. (Our full story of the massacre is here.)

He was born on 27 September 1907 (some records say the 28th) in Banga, a canal-colony village in Lyallpur district, today’s Faisalabad in Pakistan. The family’s roots were in Khatkar Kalan, in the Doaba. Rebellion ran in the house. His father, Kishan Singh, was in jail when he was born, over the 1907 protests against the Canal Colonisation Bill, and his uncle Ajit Singh had been deported to Mandalay that year with Lala Lajpat Rai.

His boyhood hero was Kartar Singh Sarabha, the Ghadar Party’s teenage editor, hanged in Lahore in 1915 at 19. Bhagat Singh carried his photograph.

He went to the DAV School in Lahore, and then, when Gandhi called on students to quit government-aided institutions, to the National College that Lajpat Rai had founded. He read everything: Irish rebels, Russian anarchists, Marx, Lenin. When his family fixed his marriage, he ran away to Kanpur, worked at a press under a false name and joined the Hindustan Republican Association. In March 1926 he helped start the Naujawan Bharat Sabha in Lahore and became its secretary.

In September 1928, a group of young men met among the broken walls of Feroz Shah Kotla, the 14th-century fort in Delhi. They gave their old party a new word. It became the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, and Chandrashekhar Azad, the one leader the police had never caught, would command its armed wing.

Most were students in their early twenties who argued about Bakunin over tea. Their goal was a socialist republic. Their method included the pistol.

On 30 October 1928, the Simon Commission reached Lahore. It had come to recommend how India should be governed, and it did not have a single Indian member. Lala Lajpat Rai, the 63-year-old ‘Punjab Kesari’, led the march against it.

Lahore’s police superintendent, James A. Scott, ordered a lathi charge, and accounts of the day say he struck Lajpat Rai himself. That evening, bruised, Rai told a meeting at Mochi Gate that the blows were ‘the last nails in the coffin of British rule in India’.

He died on 17 November 1928. Doctors believed the beating had hastened his death. When the matter reached the British Parliament, the government denied any role.

Here is the twist. Bhagat Singh had fallen out with Lajpat Rai, whom he thought had drifted into communal politics. The historian Bipan Chandra records that his circle printed Browning’s poem The Lost Leader as a pamphlet with Rai’s photograph on the cover. But the police beating India’s senior leader in the street was an insult they would not swallow. The HSRA decided Scott would die.

At about 4 pm on 17 December 1928, a young officer walked out of the district police office in Lahore towards his motorcycle. Jai Gopal, posted to watch for Scott, gave the signal. He had picked the wrong man.

It was John Poyntz Saunders, an assistant superintendent still on probation. He was 21, born in Peterborough in England two months before Bhagat Singh. Rajguru fired first. Bhagat Singh then fired several more shots into the fallen officer. The post-mortem counted eight wounds.

The shooters ran for the grounds of DAV College across the road. One policeman ran after them: head constable Chanan Singh, a Punjabi Sikh. Most accounts say Azad, covering the escape, shot him. He died there.

In 2022 a law student told the Punjab and Haryana High Court, citing a book, that Azad had warned the constable repeatedly, aimed at his thigh, and that Chanan Singh bled to death because everyone was busy with Saunders. No court has tested that story. Either way, a man who was not the target, and had beaten nobody, was dead. The Punjab Police Rules still carried a memorial fund in the names of Saunders and Chanan Singh in 2022; the student wanted it scrapped as an insult to the freedom fighters.

Next morning, handwritten leaflets on Lahore’s walls announced that Lajpat Rai had been avenged. They called Saunders the agent of the most tyrannical government in the world. A copy in Bhagat Singh’s handwriting was later shown in court.

Sorry for the death of a man.HSRA leaflet pasted up in Lahore, 18 December 1928, signed ‘Balraj’

Two days after the shooting, Sukhdev knocked on Durgawati Devi’s door. Bhagat Singh cut his hair, shaved his beard and put on Western clothes and a hat. With Durga Bhabhi and her infant son beside him, he boarded a train as a young gentleman travelling with his wife and child. Rajguru carried the bags as their servant. The disguise worked.

On 8 April 1929, two young men sat in the visitors’ gallery of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. Below them, the House was dealing with two bills the revolutionaries hated, the Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Bill. Sir John Simon himself was watching from the President’s gallery.

Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two bombs onto empty benches. They went off with a roar and a cloud of smoke, and leaflets fluttered down. The two shouted ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, a slogan the Urdu poet Hasrat Mohani had coined in 1921, and stood still to be arrested.

Nobody was killed. A few members were hurt, among them the Finance Member, Sir George Schuster, slightly.

It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear.HSRA leaflet thrown in the Assembly, 8 April 1929

The same leaflet said its authors held human life sacred and that you could kill individuals but not ideas. Their statement in court, read out on 6 June, said revolution was ‘not the cult of the bomb and the pistol’. On 12 June 1929, Sessions Judge Leonard Middleton sentenced both men to transportation for life.

That might have been the end. But on 15 April police had raided an HSRA bomb factory in Lahore and arrested Sukhdev, Kishori Lal and Jai Gopal. Jai Gopal and later Hans Raj Vohra turned approver, witnesses for the Crown, and the Saunders file suddenly had names. Rajguru was caught in Pune later that year.

The .32 Colt that, The Tribune reports, was used on Saunders went on its own journey: last seen at the police academy in Phillaur in 1969, traced to a BSF weapons school in Indore in 2016, and put on display at Hussainiwala in 2017.

In jail, Bhagat Singh found that European prisoners got better food, clothes and books than Indian political prisoners. In June 1929 he stopped eating. Others joined him. They wanted decent food, books and newspapers, and no forced labour.

When the Saunders trial opened in Lahore’s Borstal Jail on 10 July 1929, he was carried into court on a stretcher.

Jatindra Nath Das would not give up. On 13 September 1929, after 63 days without food, he died in Lahore jail. In the Central Legislative Assembly, a Bombay lawyer who would one day found Pakistan rose to defend the strikers.

The man who goes on a hunger strike has a soul.Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Central Legislative Assembly, 1929

Nehru visited the strikers. The Viceroy, Lord Irwin, cut short his summer in Simla. On 5 October, after 116 days and at the request of the Congress and his own father, Bhagat Singh ate again.

The magistrate’s court in Lahore became a stage. The accused sang, shouted slogans and, on 21 January 1930, walked in wearing red scarves for Lenin Day. When one of them threw a slipper at the approver Jai Gopal, the magistrate ordered handcuffs. The prisoners refused, were beaten, and boycotted the court.

The government ran out of patience. On 1 May 1930, Lord Irwin issued an ordinance creating a special tribunal of three High Court judges. It could proceed without the accused in the room, and there was no appeal except to the Privy Council in London. The government’s stated reason was to finish a trial it said the accused were deliberately wrecking.

Within days the tribunal ordered the prisoners handcuffed and taken out. The only Indian judge, Agha Haidar, put on record that he had nothing to do with that order. On 21 June 1930 he was removed from the tribunal, as the jurist A.G. Noorani has documented.

The prosecution listed 607 witnesses and examined 457. The accused called none and cross-examined none, because they refused to recognise the court. Five approvers testified against their old comrades.

Bhagat Singh wanted no defence at all. When his father petitioned the tribunal on his behalf, the son answered in an open letter on 4 October 1930.

I feel as though I have been stabbed at the back.Bhagat Singh to his father, Kishan Singh, 4 October 1930

Three days later, on 7 October 1930, the tribunal sentenced Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru to death. Others got transportation for life or prison terms; three were acquitted. The ordinance itself lapsed on 31 October without ever being approved by the Assembly or Parliament. The Privy Council refused to interfere on 11 February 1931, and Justice Bhide of the Lahore High Court threw out a habeas corpus plea on 24 February.

For the Raj the case was simple. Two policemen had been shot dead in Lahore, bomb factories had been found, and the accused were proud of what they had done. The law said murder meant the rope.

In early October 1930, a Muslim jailer arranged an unusual meeting in Lahore jail. Bhai Randhir Singh, a devout Sikh and Ghadar veteran about to be released, sat down with the young prisoner. By most accounts he told Bhagat Singh that fame had made him proud, and pride stood between him and God.

On 5 and 6 October 1930, Bhagat Singh wrote his answer, Why I Am an Atheist. It was published after his death, in The People of Lahore on 27 September 1931.

It is not an angry essay. He admits that faith would make his last days easier, and turns it down anyway. He asks why an all-powerful God would allow hunger and exploitation, cites Darwin, and argues that belief grew out of human fear. To start praying now, with the noose in sight, would be, he wrote, ‘an act of degradation and demoralization’.

Sikh tradition remembers that meeting differently. In his prison memoir, Jail Chitthian, Bhai Randhir Singh wrote that Bhagat Singh told him he had been an atheist until then but that a new spiritual awareness had come to him; the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records his account. The essay, dated the very next days, says the opposite. Readers can weigh both.

On 17 February 1931, Gandhi walked into the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi to begin talks with Lord Irwin. Civil disobedience had filled the jails, and both sides wanted a truce. In a Lahore cell, three young men were waiting to be hanged. What Gandhi did for them is still one of the angriest arguments in Indian history. Here is the record.

Two more facts matter. Bhagat Singh did not want mercy: he refused to sign a clemency appeal, and in their last weeks the three asked to be shot by firing squad, as prisoners of war, rather than hanged. And the Congress Working Committee had agreed, Gandhi later wrote, not to make their reprieve a condition of the truce.

When Gandhi arrived in Karachi for the Congress session days after the hanging, young men met him with black flags. The Congress passed a resolution praising the courage and sacrifice of the three while restating that it rejected political violence. Gandhi told the session he had wanted to save them.

The way of violence can only lead to perdition.Gandhi, Karachi Congress, March 1931

The hanging was set for the morning of 24 March 1931. Instead, the jail moved it up by about 11 hours, to the evening of 23 March.

That afternoon Bhagat Singh was reading a book about Lenin. At about 7 pm (some accounts say 7:30), the three were walked to the gallows. Bhagat Singh was 23, Sukhdev 23, Rajguru 22. By accounts gathered afterwards, they went shouting slogans against British imperialism.

No regular magistrate would supervise. The papers were signed by an honorary magistrate from Kasur, Nawab Muhammad Ahmad Khan Kasuri. Lahore has a long memory: in 1974 he was shot dead in an ambush meant for his son, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was convicted of ordering it and hanged in 1979, and in 2024 Pakistan’s Supreme Court said Bhutto had not had a fair trial.

Then came the part Punjab has never forgiven. According to the Ferozepur district administration’s account, the jail’s back wall was broken open and the bodies driven out in secret, to the bank of the Sutlej near Ferozepur. Several accounts say they were cut up first. At Hussainiwala they were burned without rites, and what remained went into the river.

Villagers saw the fire. The next day relatives and comrades recovered what they could and carried it back to Lahore, where a procession of mourners took it for last rites on the Ravi.

Shops shut across north India. Nehru later wrote that Bhagat Singh had become a symbol: ‘the act was forgotten, the symbol remained’.

In July 2022, a sitting MP from Punjab told reporters in Karnal what he thought of Bhagat Singh. Simranjit Singh Mann of the Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) called him a terrorist, saying he had killed a young English officer and an Amritdhari Sikh constable, Chanan Singh, and bombed the Assembly. Punjab’s AAP ministers demanded an apology; BJP leaders sought a police case. Mann did not back down.

It was not the first fight over the word. In 2016, Bhagat Singh’s family objected to a Delhi University reference book, India’s Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra and others, which called him a ‘revolutionary terrorist’. His nephew Abhey Singh Sandhu pointed out that even the British judgment had not used the word. The book’s defenders said historians meant a method, not an insult.

Bhagat Singh answered the charge himself, in a note to young activists seven weeks before he died.

Apparently I have acted like a terrorist. But I am not a terrorist.Bhagat Singh, ‘To Young Political Workers’, 2 February 1931

In the same note he called mere bomb-throwing useless and sometimes harmful, and asked for patient organising of workers and peasants. He never renounced the pistol, but by the end he no longer believed it could free India on its own.

The argument had raged in his lifetime. After the HSRA tried to blow up Lord Irwin’s train near Delhi in December 1929, Gandhi wrote ‘The Cult of the Bomb’. The HSRA answered with ‘The Philosophy of the Bomb’, written by Bhagwati Charan Vohra.

In 2014, on a court’s order, Lahore police went into the old records of the Anarkali police station and came out with an 85-year-old Urdu document: the FIR on the Saunders killing. It was registered at 4:30 pm on 17 December 1928 against ‘two unknown gunmen’. Bhagat Singh’s name is not in it.

The man who asked for it is Imtiaz Rashid Qureshi, a Lahore lawyer whose family came from Abohar at Partition. His Bhagat Singh Memorial Foundation wants the Lahore High Court to reopen the case, set aside the sentence and give Bhagat Singh posthumous state honours. He says the tribunal hanged him without letting his lawyers cross-examine some 450 witnesses. A judge referred the petition for a larger bench in 2013; in September 2023 the High Court objected that it was not maintainable for one. We found no ruling on the merits.

The record cuts both ways. An FIR against unknown gunmen is normal when attackers escape. The witnesses went unchallenged largely because the accused refused to take part. And Bhagat Singh never claimed innocence: a leaflet in his own hand defended the killing. What his supporters can fairly say is that the tribunal was built to convict.

The fight over his name in Lahore is fiercer still. The gallows stood where Shadman Chowk is today. In 2012 the city planned to name the chowk after him. The Tehreek-e-Hurmat-e-Rasool, linked to Jamaat-ud-Dawa, objected that Pakistan’s squares should honour Muslims, and a trader’s petition got the High Court to stop the notification.

In January 2025 the Lahore corporation finally said no. A retired naval officer’s report it relied on called Bhagat Singh a criminal: ‘In today’s terms he was a terrorist’. Justice Shams Mehmood Mirza of the Lahore High Court dismissed the foundation’s petition. Qureshi said he would go to the Supreme Court; we could not confirm that he has.

Yet weeks earlier, on 30 December 2024, Punjab’s Chief Secretary Zahid Akhtar Zaman had opened a Bhagat Singh Gallery at Poonch House in Lahore, full of papers from his trial. Small groups gather in Lahore every 23 March, at times under tight security because of threats. In September 2025 the foundation called him ‘a shared hero of both India and Pakistan’.

On 16 March 2022, a sea of yellow turbans filled the fields of Khatkar Kalan. Bhagwant Mann took the oath as Punjab’s chief minister in Bhagat Singh’s ancestral village and asked his supporters to wear basanti in his memory. A portrait of Bhagat Singh in a yellow turban went up in his office.

Historians winced. The scholar Chaman Lal, who has spent decades on Bhagat Singh’s papers, says only four genuine photographs exist and in none is he wearing a yellow or saffron turban. The most famous one, in a felt hat, was taken in Delhi in 1929. The family called the row trivial: his ideas mattered, not the colour of a turban.

Everybody claims him. The left quotes his Marx; Sikh groups point to his family and to Bhai Randhir Singh’s memoir; the Congress, the BJP and AAP all hang his picture. An 18-foot bronze of him has stood in Parliament since 2008, and Chandigarh’s airport at Mohali took his name on 28 September 2022.

At Hussainiwala, his cremation ground ended up on Pakistan’s side of the 1947 border. India got it back in 1961 by handing over 12 villages near the Sulemanki headworks, and a memorial was opened in 1968. In the 1971 war, Pakistani troops overran it and carried off the busts of the three; they were later recovered through diplomatic channels. Batukeshwar Dutt, who died in 1965, asked to be cremated beside his friends. So did Bhagat Singh’s mother, Vidyawati.

Cinema made him a star. Manoj Kumar played him in Shaheed (1965), whose songs ‘Mera Rang De Basanti Chola’ and ‘Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna’ are still sung every 23 March. In 2002 three Bhagat Singh films came out within two weeks; Rajkumar Santoshi’s The Legend of Bhagat Singh, with Ajay Devgn, won the National Award for the best Hindi film, while Bobby Deol’s 23rd March 1931: Shaheed opened the same day and both lost money. Rang De Basanti (2006) made him the conscience of a generation of college students.

Strip away the posters and three things are true at once.

First, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru set out to kill a man and killed the wrong one, and their commander shot dead a Punjabi constable doing his job. Saunders was 21. Chanan Singh’s name barely survives. A story that leaves them out is a legend, not history.

Second, the Raj answered them with a tribunal built to convict: an ordinance that took away the right of appeal, an Indian judge removed after he objected, a hanging moved up and bodies burned in the dark. A government sure of its justice does not dispose of its prisoners like contraband.

Third, the young man outgrew the gun. By 1931 he was writing that bombs alone were useless and calling for unions, study and patience. He went to the gallows at 23 refusing mercy and refusing God, and left behind a jail notebook of ideas that still start arguments in Lahore and Ludhiana.

That is why both Punjabs still fight over him. Nobody fights over a statue that has nothing to say.