How Bhagat Singh endures, even for the misguided

He lived for all of 23 years and 176 days, and died 92 years ago. Yet, he is everywhere -- in the brush stroke of his thin pencil moustache in graffiti adorning the walls of India’s villages; in the outline of his tilted-to-the-right fedora hat from his prison photograph on modern-day bumper stickers and coffee mugs. He is, by government order, on the walls of every government office in Punjab. He is an arterial road in every city. And he has given his name to Chandigarh’s international airport.

- Dipankar Ghose

{ REVOLUTIONARY ICON } FOREVER IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Most recently, he is pasted all over the social media profiles of four young men and women who met online in a fan club dedicated to him, and on the day India marked 22 years to the Parliament attack in 2001, breached the security of one of India’s most hallowed (and protected) buildings, colour gas canisters in hand.

His name is Bhagat Singh, writer, philosopher, freedom fighter. In a country where history is now increasingly contested, where leaders are valorised and demonised in equal measure, he is everyone’s hero.

Bhagat Singh was many things, all at once, deeply complicated, and deeply nuanced. It is nuance that allows for political appropriation, for little bits of his identity to be picked apart and owned. For the nationalists, he was the man who rejuvenated a sagging freedom movement by killing British police officer John Saunders as a 21-year-old, abjuring the notion of strain of the non-violence that was one feature of the Indian independence struggle.

He was an anarchist who read Bakunin.

For the Left, he was a working-class hero, inspired by Lenin, Marx and Trotsky.

For the secularists, he was the man who was stunned by the bigotry in a country united by the desire to be free, but torn apart by communal fissures. He was an atheist and wrote in his seminal essay, Why I am an Atheist: “One of my friends asked me to pray. When informed of my atheism, he said, ‘When your last days come, you will begin to believe.’ I said, ‘No, dear sir, never shall it happen. I consider it to be an act of degradation and demoralisation. For such petty selfish motives, I shall never pray.’ Readers and friends, is it vanity? If it is, I stand for it.”