Bhagat Singh was a revolutionary with a difference. He was a thinking young man imbued with the principles of socialism and viewed the winning of independence from the British as the first and fundamental step towards the establishment of a just and equitable social order where the toiling masses would get their fair share of the fruits of freedom. He did not believe that mere independence could achieve it for it would necessarily mean the transfer of power from the plundering British to the plundering businessmen of free India which would not mean any real freedom for the teeming millions toiling away in the fields and factories.
Bhagat Singh died at the age of 23 but had formed such mature ideas about nation-building that it takes one's breath away to contemplate what he could have achieved for India were Gandhi willing enough to save him from the gallows by refusing to sign the Gandhi-Irwin Pact unless Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru's death sentence in the Lahore Conspiracy Case was commuted. It would have raised the Mahatma in public esteem where it has forever lowered him and would have afforded the services of this sublime soul bearing the name Singh for the motherland for many more years to come.
The British destroyed India's human resources like anything, apart from plundering her natural resources for centuries, and they will have to pay the price of it with interest compounded in the ages to come.
Written by Sugata Bose
No comments:
Post a Comment