From AAP to BJP, Cong to Akali Dal, one common hero: Bhagat Singh

Ageless in death, Bhagat Singh has always been the mascot of the youth in the region. The Bhagwant Singh Mann government put its official stamp on him when it took the oath of office at his ancestral village of Khatkar Kalan on March 16 amid slogans of “inquilab Zindabad”. The CM also announced that every government office would now have Singh’s picture along with that of Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar, besides declaring March 23, the day on which he was sent to the gallows, a state holiday.

In May, the AAP, which positions itself as the protector of Bhagat Singh’s legacy, sought to paint BJP as anti-Singh by accusing the Karnataka government of deliberately removing a chapter on the martyr from the Class 10 textbooks. The state government later denied the accusation and said the chapter was very much in print.

While the AAP may have been the first government to appropriate Bhagat Singh on such a scale, every political party has paid its respect to him.

At the height of the turmoil in Punjab, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi also sought to invoke Bhagat Singh when he visited the National Martyrs’ Memorial at Hussainiwala in Ferozepur district on March 23, 1985, months after the assassination of PM Indira Gandhi. Bhagat Singh and his comrades were cremated at Hussainiwala after their bodies were surreptitiously brought here by the British authorities after their execution.

In 2015, Narendra Modi, wearing a basanti turban, became the second prime minister to visit Hussainiwala. Earlier, in 2013, he had, as the PM candidate, chosen to release a book on Singh’s prison diary even though it’s a part treatise on his Leftist ideology.

In 2007, the jail notebook with handwritten pages was published by the governments of Punjab and Haryana. The Parliament complex installed his 18-foot-tall bronze statue on Independence Day in 2008. The Akali Dal-BJP government laid the foundation stone of the Shaheed-e-Azam Sardar Bhagat Singh Memorial and Museum at Khatkar Kalan during their tenure. It was finally inaugurated by the then CM Captain Amarinder Singh in 2018.

Bhagat Singh was also the icon of the year-long farmers’ agitation against the three farm laws, which were repealed in November 2021.

Prof Chaman Lal, who has dedicated his life to researching the revolutionary, attributes Bhagat Singh’s wide appeal to the breadth of his ideals. “Anyone who has done a lay reading of Bhagat Singh’s writings would know that he sought freedom not just from the British but also from poverty, corruption, discrimination, and communalism, issues that affect all of us in one way or the other.’’

After the AAP, the Haryana BJP has also been focusing on Bhagat Singh. The party observed his death anniversary on March 23 at 306 places in the state using the tagline “Mera rang de basanti chola”, with BJP chief OP Dhankar leading youngsters to places associated with the freedom fighter and his companions.

While everyone loves Bhagat Singh, Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) leader Simranjit Singh Mann, the maverick Sangrur MP, has often courted controversy by calling the freedom fighter a “terrorist” for killing an “innocent English officer and a baptised constable”. In December 2007, he was arrested in Patiala for this very reason. There was much uproar in the political circles this July when he made the same statement in response to a question. But like many of his other opinions, it’s considered fringe. And it’s never had any bearing on the cult of Bhagat Singh.

Bhagat Singh himself said, “Revolution (inquilab) is not a culture of bomb and pistol. Our meaning of revolution is to change the present conditions, which are based on manifest injustice.”