March 23, 1931: The Day Three Young Men Chose the Gallows – and What They Still Say to India
Ninety-five years after Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged at Lahore Central Jail, their questions about the state, dissent, economic justice and the ownership of martyrdom have not gone away. If anything, they have sharpened.
Sometime before sunset on 23 March 1931, three young men were hanged inside Lahore Central Jail. The British colonial administration had moved the execution hours ahead of schedule, quietly, almost nervously, as though it feared what daylight and a gathering crowd might bring. Bhagat Singh was 23. Shivaram Rajguru was 22. Sukhdev Thapar was 23. They reportedly walked to the gallows singing. There is no strong reason to disbelieve this.
Ninety-five years on, India pauses every 23 March to mark what it calls Shaheed Diwas. Schools hold assemblies. Politicians post sepia portraits. Social media fills for a few hours with the slogan Inquilab Zindabad. Then, for the most part, the moment passes.
What does not pass are the questions these three men left behind. Questions about the state and the citizen, about dissent and its limits, about who gets to claim a martyr’s legacy and what they quietly do with it. Those questions are, if anything, sharper in 2026 than they were when the British sealed the jail gates and tried to dispose of three bodies before a crowd could form.
Who They Were, Before the Mythology
The mythology arrived fast, as it always does with the young dead. It is worth clearing it away first.
Bhagat Singh was not simply a hotheaded young man who threw a bomb and paid the price. He was ideologically serious, literate in Marxist theory and genuinely preoccupied with what freedom would actually mean for ordinary Indians once the British were gone. His essay Why I Am an Atheist, written in prison while awaiting execution, is a work of real intellectual rigour. Not the posturing of a 23-year-old, but the considered argument of someone who had actually thought through the questions. He read voraciously in custody. He organised hunger strikes for prisoners’ rights. He used his trial not as a defence but as a political platform, delivering statements that were reported across the subcontinent.
Rajguru, from Pune, was the more instinctive fighter of the three. He had watched, along with much of nationalist India, the public assault on Lala Lajpat Rai during a protest against the Simon Commission in 1928. Police, under the command of Superintendent John Saunders, baton-charged the crowd. Rai died weeks later, and the connection was widely made. The killing of Saunders in December 1928, carried out by Singh, Rajguru and others as deliberate retaliation, was the act that brought them eventually to the gallows.
Sukhdev Thapar, Singh’s childhood friend from Lyallpur in present-day Pakistan, was one of the principal organisers of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), the body that gave the movement its ideological backbone and its operational structure. What British prosecutors called the Lahore Conspiracy Case was the legal vehicle used to convict all three.
These were not impulsive men. They were organised, committed and entirely clear about what they were doing and what it would cost. That makes the story harder to fit onto a poster, and considerably more interesting.
The State and the Person Who Refuses to Stay Quiet
The British were not primarily afraid of Bhagat Singh’s pistol. They were afraid of his ideas, delivered clearly and without apology to anyone who would listen. The courtroom speeches, the hunger strikes, the prison writings, the scale of popular recognition he had built – these were the real problem. Violence, the empire had mechanisms for. Organised political thought, spoken in plain language to people who understood it, was a different kind of challenge altogether.
That tension, between a state’s claim to order and a citizen’s insistence on conscience, has not resolved itself in the ninety-five years since. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Prison Census, India has consistently appeared among the higher-ranked countries for jailed journalists in recent years. The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) has been used to hold individuals in pre-trial detention for years, in cases where the prosecution’s evidence has sometimes not survived judicial examination.
Consider the case of Siddique Kappan, a Kerala journalist who was arrested in October 2020 while travelling to Hathras in Uttar Pradesh to report on the gang rape and death of a young Dalit woman. He was held for over two years before the Supreme Court granted him bail in September 2022. He was eventually acquitted of the most serious charges. He was a reporter going to cover a story. That is the concrete version of the abstract argument about legal architecture.
This is not a charge directed at any single administration. It genuinely is not. The Sedition Law under which Bhagat Singh was prosecuted, Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, remained on India’s statute books for 74 years after independence. It was used, periodically and selectively, by governments of varying political colour, to silence speech that was inconvenient rather than genuinely dangerous. The Supreme Court placed it in abeyance in 2022. The instinct it encoded has proved more durable than the specific provision.
The dead cannot correct the record, which makes them politically useful in ways that the living rarely are.
Who Exactly Owns Bhagat Singh
This is where things get politically uncomfortable, and a serious piece about this anniversary cannot avoid it.
Bhagat Singh was a socialist. He was an atheist. He was explicitly and repeatedly on record opposing communal politics, opposing the idea that religious identity should organise political life, and opposing what he saw as the class betrayals embedded within the mainstream nationalist movement. He said all of this clearly. He wrote it down. The historical record is unambiguous on these points.
He is today claimed enthusiastically and with apparent sincerity by political forces spread across the full range of Indian opinion, including some whose core stated commitments he would have directly contested. This is not a practice unique to India or to this anniversary. Ambedkar is quoted by parties with long records of opposing reservations. Gandhi is invoked by governments presiding over exactly the concentrated political authority he warned against most clearly. The dead cannot correct the record, which makes them politically useful in ways that the living rarely are.
What tends to disappear in this process is the actual content. The socialism, the atheism, the anti-communalism, the class politics – these are rarely present in the anniversary posts. What remains is the image. The beret, the look, the slogan. Bhagat Singh as an aesthetic rather than a programme. This is a form of erasure that is arguably worse than neglect, because it creates the appearance of remembering while ensuring that nothing actually remembered carries any weight.
Young Men Who Concluded the System Was Beyond Repair
Bhagat Singh was 23. Rajguru was 22. Worth sitting with those numbers.
They were not anomalies or random individuals who went wrong. They were the products of a specific cluster of conditions: a political system that had blocked every legitimate avenue for meaningful expression, a direct personal experience of injustice and humiliation, a tight community of shared ideological belief that reinforced commitment, and the particular quality of moral certainty that belongs, for better or worse, to people who are young and convinced that history is watching and waiting for them to act.
That same cluster of conditions continues to operate in recognisable form within India today. In the forested districts of Bastar in Chhattisgarh, documented accounts from journalists, anthropologists and judicial proceedings consistently describe a pattern in which young Adivasi men, facing land displacement, institutional neglect and the absence of any viable legal channel for grievance, have been drawn into Maoist networks not primarily through ideology but through the felt experience of having no other door open to them. The ideology came later, and filled a space that the state had left empty. That is not so different, in its essential structure, from what happened to a young man in Lyallpur in the 1920s watching the colonial machine grind people he knew into the ground.
Research on radicalisation more broadly, whether in the context of far-right mobilisation in Europe or organised jihadist recruitment elsewhere, tends to confirm the same prior conditions: blocked mobility, witnessed injustice, a community that gives the anger a shape, and a narrative that makes sacrifice feel historically meaningful. Bhagat Singh fits this profile with considerable precision. That is not a criticism of him. It is an observation that should sit alongside the celebration and make it slightly more honest.
On capital punishment
India retains the death penalty. The legal standard governing its application is the “rarest of rare” doctrine established by the Supreme Court in its 1980 Bachan Singh judgment. In practice, people have spent many years on death row, some ultimately executed, others having had their sentences commuted after prolonged periods of legal uncertainty.
Arguments about deterrence have weak empirical support in the published research literature. The irreversibility of the punishment makes any wrongful execution a permanent error. These are not minority concerns. They are addressed seriously by courts, legal scholars and human rights bodies across jurisdictions where the debate is live and unresolved.
Whether any state, democratic or colonial, has the moral authority to end a human life as judicial punishment is a question this piece raises without pretending to resolve. The anniversary is a reasonable moment to sit with it.
The Economics He Would Not Leave Alone
It is easy, in all the attention paid to Bhagat Singh’s anti-colonialism, to let his socialism become a footnote. He would have found that irritating.
The argument was central, not peripheral. He believed, and said repeatedly, that transferring political power from British administrators to Indian upper-class leaders would not, by itself, change the conditions of the people at the bottom of the economic order. He was suspicious of a nationalism that could deliver formal independence while leaving the structures of economic exploitation intact. He made this case in writing and in his courtroom statements. It was not a passing concern. It was the point.
India in 2026 is constitutionally democratic, formally sovereign and a significant economic force by global measures. It is also home to wealth disparities that credible economic research has repeatedly described as among the more pronounced in the world, with the concentration of assets in a small fraction of the population widening rather than narrowing over recent decades. Farmer distress, informal labour precarity across urban and rural sectors, and the persistent intergenerational transfer of economic disadvantage along caste lines are not new problems waiting to be solved. They are structural features of the economy that policy has addressed with limited success across multiple administrations and ideological orientations.
Bhagat Singh was 23. He did not live long enough to develop detailed policy. His framework was urgent and sometimes blunt, as is typical of young men who believe they are out of time. But the central diagnosis – that political freedom and economic subjugation can coexist in the same country at the same moment, and that one without the other is not the full version of freedom – holds up in ways that are difficult to argue away without simply changing the subject.
What the Anniversary Actually Asks
There is a version of Shaheed Diwas that is comfortable and costs nothing. Post the photograph. Share the quote. Feel something briefly. Move on.
There is another version, and it is harder.
That version asks whether the conditions that produced Bhagat Singh are still present in recognisable form. Whether young Indians still run into the same walls, whether political speech is still being quietly managed into silence through updated legal instruments, whether wealth is still concentrating while futures narrow, whether the martyrs are being invoked with greatest enthusiasm by the forces they spent their short lives fighting. It asks, plainly, who profits from the icon and who buries the ideology attached to it.
It also asks something more personal, more ordinary. What does it actually mean to live in a country whose founding heroes were hanged at twenty-two and twenty-three, and to spend the anniversary mostly making sure the post goes up before noon? That is, probably, an unfair question. People have lives and are not obligated to carry history as a permanent burden. But it seems worth asking anyway, at least once a year, on this particular date.
March 23 is a date on which India genuinely mourns. That grief is real and it is earned. Three people, barely into adulthood, made a choice that most of us will never face and cannot fully understand. They deserve the assemblies, the portraits, the silence.
They also deserve the harder question. The one that does not compress into a social media post. The one that Bhagat Singh, sitting in his jail cell and reading and arguing and writing until the very end, was probably hoping someone would eventually ask and then actually do something about.
Inquilab Zindabad. The revolution lives. What we are doing with it is a separate matter entirely.
