Shaheed Bhagat Singh

Bhagat Singh
Bhagat Singh in 1929
Born	27 or 28 September 1907 Banga, Jaranwala Tehsil, Lyallpur district, Punjab, British India (present-day Pakistan)
Died	23 March 1931(1931-03-23) (aged 23) Lahore, Punjab, British India (present-day Pakistan)
Organization	Naujawan Bharat Sabha Hindustan Socialist Republican Association Kirti Kisan Party
Movement	Indian Independence movement

Bhagat Singh (IPA: [pə̀ɡət̪ sɪ́ŋɡ] 1907 – 23 March 1931) was an Indian socialist nationalist whose acts of dramatic violence against the British in India, hunger strike in jail, and execution at age 23, made him a folk hero of the Indian independence movement.

In December 1928, Bhagat Singh and an associate, Shivaram Rajguru, fatally shot a British junior police officer, John Saunders, in Lahore, British India, mistaking him for the British police superintendent, James Scott, whom they had intended to assassinate. They believed Scott was responsible for the death of popular Indian nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai, by having ordered a lathi charge in which Rai was injured, and, two weeks after which, died of a heart attack. Saunders was shot once by Rajguru and several times by Singh, the postmortem report showing eight bullet wounds. Another associate of Singh, shot dead an Indian police constable who attempted to pursue Singh. After escaping, Singh and his associates took responsibility for the act by pasting posters they had prepared for public display, but which they altered to advertise Saunders as their intended target. Singh was on the run for many months. In April 1929, Singh and another associate threw two low-intensity bombs inside the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi, and thereafter courted arrest. While Singh was in jail, awaiting trial for murder, he gained both sympathy and notoriety when he went on a hunger strike, demanding better prison conditions for Indian prisoners. He was convicted and hanged for his participation in the Saunders murder in 1931, aged 23.

Bhagat Singh became a popular folk hero after his death. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote about him, "Bhaghat Singh did not become popular because of his act of terrorism but because he seemed to vindicate, for the moment, the honour of Lala Lajpat Rai, and through him of the nation. He became a symbol; the act was forgotten, the symbol remained, and within a few months each town and village of the Punjab, and to a lesser extent in the rest of northern India, resounded with his name." In still later years, Singh, an atheist and socialist in life, gained admirers from among a political spectrum that included both Communists and right-wing Hindu nationalists.