This day we must remember the sacrifices of Chandrasekhar Azad who, betrayed by a compatriot, died valiantly fighting the British forces at Alfred Park, Prayagraj.
27 February, 1931 marks a significant moment in India's struggle for freedom. It epitomises all that was manly in our armed resistance to the dastardly British reign in India for two centuries and more that despoiled her of her wealth and ruined her people's hopes and aspirations like no nation has ever done to this great motherland of ours. The British, like leeches, sucked the life-blood of the nation and rent her dry before they were forced out of her shores by the cumulative revolutionary movement of men like Chandrasekhar Azad and his comrades-in-arms, a struggle that progressively built up to culminate in the final assault of the Indian National Army at the height of the Second World War leading to their eventual eviction.
This day we must remember. We must bow down our heads in salutations to the prostrate form of the free soul who laid down his life by his own hands but could not brook arrest by the enemy. That last bullet when ammunition had failed him, he reserved for his own body before he flew on the wings of supernal love for the motherland to his own freedom.
But freedom for Azad, whose very name epitomised the spirit of the revolutionaries, could not be achieved in his lifetime, and he left behind his legacy for future revolutionaries to carry on his crusade, a legacy that yet lives on to light fresher lamps of that intangible aspect of the revolutionary breed that know no rest till all of humanity has been rendered justice in this world of terrible iniquities.
Azad had carried on the mantle from the hanged Ramprasad Bismil, Rajendranath Lahiri, Ashfaqulla Khan and Thakur Roshan Singh, the quartet who had been damned by the authorities for their conducting of the Kakori Train Robbery in 1925. He was himself actively involved in this daring robbery but escaped arrest and lay underground for a while before, aided by the likes of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar, Shivaram Rajguru, Bhagvati Charan Vohra and Batukeshwar Dutta, he reorganised resistance to the British, attempted the blowing up of the Viceroy's train in 1926 and avenged the death of Lala Lajpat Rai by assassinating of J.P. Saunders at Lahore in 1928.
The rest is well chronicled in history, the Central Legislative Assembly bombing by Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutta in 1929, the infamous incarceration of Azad's followers in Lahore Jail followed by the travesty of a trail that led to the execution of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru for involvement and complicity in the murder of Saunders, and the final act of self-immolation fighting the British at Alfred Park on 27 February, 1931 that has immortalised Chandrasekhar Azad and draw us today to offer our heart's adoration at his hallowed feet.
Undaunted in life and unvanquished in death, Chandrasekhar Azad lives on. May our motherland, Mother India, bless her beloved son is the earnest prayer unto her by this insignificant son of hers !
Vande Mataram ! Jai Hind !
Written by Sugata Bose
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