Bhagat Singh

In the first days of October 1930 a prisoner in the Central Jail at Lahore sat down to answer a question his friends had been asking about him. He was twenty-three. Within a week a special tribunal would give its verdict in the case against him, and he expected it to be death. Some of the people who visited him thought that his refusal to believe in God came from pride, and that the fame of his trials had gone to his head. He began his answer with their question. "A new question has cropped up. Is it due to vanity that I do not believe in the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient God?"¹²³

The essay he wrote, "Why I Am an Atheist," was published in a Lahore weekly in September 1931, six months after he was hanged.³ It was written by a young man who believed that force used in a just cause was morally justified, and who did not ask anyone to forgive him for what he had done. This chapter follows Bhagat Singh from a boyhood of hours-long prayer to that cell, and asks the question he asked himself: where did his unbelief come from, and did it hold?

A perfect devotee

He was born in September 1907 in the canal colonies of the Punjab, at Banga in Lyallpur district, in what is now Pakistan, into a Sikh family that had already been in trouble with the government; accounts differ on whether the day was the 27th or the 28th.⁴⁵ He described his own upbringing exactly. "My grandfather under whose influence I was brought up is an orthodox Arya Samajist. An Arya Samajist is anything but an atheist."⁶ The Arya Samaj was a Hindu reform movement, and it ran its own schools, the D.A.V. schools. After his primary schooling the boy spent a full year as a boarder there. "There, apart from morning and evening prayers, I used to recite 'Gayatri Mantra' for hours and hours. I was perfect devotee in those days."⁷⁸

Later he lived with his father, Kishan Singh, whom he called "a liberal in as much as the orthodoxy of religions is concerned" but "a firm believer," a man who encouraged him to pray every day and through whose teaching, he said, he first came to want freedom for his country.⁸ The first crack came in his teens, when he joined the National College at Lahore, during the campaign of non-cooperation with British rule. "It was there that I began to think liberally and discuss and criticise all the religious problem, even about God. But still I was a devout believer." He kept his hair uncut, as a Sikh, but he wrote that "I could never believe in the mythology and doctrines of Sikhism or any other religion. But I had a firm faith in God's existence."⁹¹⁰¹¹ Accounts differ on the year he entered the college; he says only that it was "in the Non-Cooperation days."¹²

Study

The revolutionaries he joined in the mid-1920s were not unbelievers, and he was careful to say so. The first leader he met "could not dare to deny the existence of God." The second, Sachindra Nath Sanyal, sang the glory of God in his book Bandi Jivan. The men of the Kakori conspiracy who went to the gallows spent their last days in prayer: Ram Prasad Bismil was an orthodox Arya Samajist, and Rajen Lahiri recited the Upanishads and the Gita. Bhagat Singh knew only one comrade who never prayed, and even he "never dared to deny the existence of God."¹³

What changed his mind, by his own account, was not a loss or a quarrel but a crisis in the movement. In 1925 and 1926 the party was close to breaking up, and he was afraid that he too might lose faith in its programme. "That was a turning point in my revolutionary career. 'Study' was the cry that reverberated in the corridors of my mind. Study to arm yourself with arguments in favour of your cult. I began to study."¹⁴¹⁵ What he read was the literature of the European left. "I studied Bakunin, the anarchist leader, something of Marx, the father of communism, and much of Lenin, Trotsky and others—the men who had successfully carried out a revolution in their country. They were all atheists." He also read a book called Common Sense by a writer he called Nirlamba Swami, which he described as "a sort of mystic atheism."¹⁶¹⁴ By the end of 1926 he was sure. "By the end of 1926 I had been convinced as to the baselessness of the theory of existence of an almighty supreme being who created, guided and controlled the universe." He told his friends so, and became, as he put it, "a pronounced atheist."¹⁷¹⁸

Some modern accounts say that his questioning began earlier, with the riots between Hindus and Muslims that followed the end of non-cooperation. His essay does not mention them; it names study.¹⁹ On the timeline, his doubt sits at the end of 1926 for that reason: the college years loosened his religion, but by his own testimony he still believed in God until he had read his way out.

The real test

In May 1927 the police arrested him in Lahore and held him for a month. They told him they knew of his links with the Kakori men, offered him release and a reward if he would make a statement, and threatened him with a trial for murder. And, he wrote, "certain police officials began to persuade me to offer my prayers to God regularly, both the times." He thought about it seriously. "After great consideration I decided that I could not lead myself to believe in and pray to God. No, I never did. That was the real test and I came out successful."²⁰²¹ It is his account; the police version is not known.

Lahore and Delhi

On 30 October 1928 Lala Lajpat Rai led a protest in Lahore against the Simon Commission and said he had been struck by a police officer. He died a few weeks later.²² In the House of Commons the government's spokesman, Earl Winterton, answered that "no evidence has been produced to show that the death of Lala Lajpat Rai was due to blows received on that occasion," and that "there was no deliberate or unprovoked attack by the police."²³²⁴

On 17 December 1928 a young assistant superintendent of police, J. P. Saunders, was shot dead in Lahore.²⁵ That night a notice signed "Balraj" for the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association was posted in Lahore: "J.P. Sunders is dead; Lala Lajpat Rai is avenged." It said the dead man was "an agent of the British authority in India," and it did not pretend that nothing had been lost: "Sorry for the death of a man. But in this man has died the representative of an institution which is so cruel, lowly and so base that it must be abolished."²⁶²⁷ A copy of the notice in Bhagat Singh's handwriting was later used in evidence against him.²⁶ The only motive his writings give for the killing is the death of Lajpat Rai.²⁸

On 8 April 1929 he and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly in New Delhi, scattered another notice from the gallery, and waited to be arrested.²⁹ By their own account the bombs fell in empty spaces, damaged a bench and caused "some slight abrasions in less than half a dozen cases"; other accounts say some members were hurt.³⁰ In court on 6 June their statement was read for them by their lawyer, Asaf Ali. "We are next to none in our love for humanity. Far from having any malice against any individual, we hold human life sacred beyond words." Their purpose, they said, had been "to make the deaf hear." And they set out their creed against Gandhi's: "Force when aggressively applied is 'violence' and is, therefore, morally unjustifiable, but when it is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause, it has its moral justification."^31323334 They were sentenced to transportation for life.³⁵

Gandhi was not persuaded. In a private letter to Jawaharlal Nehru that summer he wrote that he understood the statement had been drafted by the prisoners' lawyer, and that it was not the sincere outpouring he and Nehru had taken it for.³⁶³⁷ In jail the prisoners went on hunger strike for the treatment of political prisoners; one of them, Jatindra Nath Das, died of it in September 1929. Gandhi explained in print why he had kept silent.³⁸³⁹

The condemned cell

The trial for the Lahore conspiracy went before a special tribunal created by the Viceroy's ordinance, which Bhagat Singh and his co-accused refused to recognise.⁴⁰ In July 1930 he wrote from the jail asking a friend for books: Liebknecht, Russell's Why Men Fight, Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Marx, Upton Sinclair, Bukharin.⁴¹ On 4 October he wrote to his father, who had petitioned the tribunal in his defence, that he felt stabbed in the back, that his life was not worth buying at the price of his principles, and that he wanted the letter published.⁴²⁴³⁴⁴

The next two days he wrote "Why I Am an Atheist."³ He did not deny that he could be vain; his comrades, he admitted, had called him an autocrat.⁴⁵ But he had stopped believing, he said, long before anyone knew his name. "My atheism is not of so recent origin. I had stopped believing in God when I was an obscure young man, of whose existence my above-mentioned friends were not even aware."⁴⁶ He did not think religion was simply a priests' fraud. Belief in God, he argued, was "almost universal" and its philosophy well developed, and men had needed it: "In God man can find very strong consolation and support. Without Him man has to depend upon himself."⁴⁷⁴⁸ His case against it came from the world he saw: the suffering God would have had to create, and the poverty that the doctrine of rebirth called a punishment for sin.⁴⁹ And he would not let God take the credit, or the blame, for the empire. "Let me tell you, British rule is here not because God wills it, but because they possess power and we do not dare to oppose them."⁵⁰

Then he wrote about the gallows. "I know the moment the rope is fitted around my neck and rafters removed under my feet, that will be the final moment." He did not want comfort. "But I do not want the help of any intoxication to meet my fate. I am a realist."⁵¹⁵² And he ended with a conversation. "One friend asked me to pray. When informed of my atheism, he said, During your last days you will begin to believe! I said, No, dear Sir, it shall not be." To pray now, he wrote, would be an act of degradation; "Is this vanity?" If it is, "I stand for it."⁵³

On 7 October 1930 the tribunal sentenced him, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru to death.⁵⁴

Not a terrorist

His unbelief did not move in the months that were left, but his view of his own method did. In November he wrote to Dutt, who would live, that he himself would go to the gallows gladly, and that Dutt must show the world that revolutionaries could bear anything.⁵⁵⁵⁶ In February 1931, in an address to young political workers, he said that he had apparently acted like a terrorist but was not one, that "mere bomb-throwing" was useless and sometimes harmful, and that the work ahead was the slow organising of a mass movement that would take at least twenty years.⁵⁷⁵⁸⁵⁹ That is the revision on his timeline, and it concerns the bomb, not his atheism. In a last petition he asked that, since the tribunal had found him guilty of waging war, he be treated as a prisoner of war and shot rather than hanged.⁶⁰⁶¹

His most important critic was also his last advocate. Gandhi raised the case with the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, in February 1931; Irwin replied that he could see no ground for commutation that would not apply equally to any other violent crime. Gandhi's own report of the meeting says he called Bhagat Singh a brave man but not in his right mind.⁶²⁶³⁶⁴ On 23 March he wrote to the Viceroy once more, arguing that an execution could not be undone and that the revolutionaries had promised to hold their hands if the lives were spared.⁶⁵⁶⁶ The three were hanged at Lahore that evening.⁶⁷

Gandhi spent the following week defending non-violence to crowds who blamed him. At Karachi young men met him with black flags, and American wire reports said they accused him of co-operating with the government that had hanged Bhagat Singh.⁶⁸ Gandhi called their anger legitimate.⁶⁹ He said that his head bowed before Bhagat Singh's bravery, but that he wanted a greater bravery, the kind that would mount the gallows without injuring anyone, and he warned the young against following the three men's example.⁷⁰⁷¹ In his own paper he wrote that Bhagat Singh was not a devotee of non-violence but did not subscribe to the religion of violence, and he condemned the government for the hangings.⁷²⁷³⁷⁴ The Congress, meeting at Karachi, disowned political violence "in any shape or form" and in the same resolution recorded "its admiration of the bravery and sacrifice" of the three.⁷⁵

Did his unbelief change shape?

It did not have time to. Bhagat Singh was a devout schoolboy, a doubter in his teens, an atheist by nineteen, and dead at twenty-three. What is remarkable is how little his unbelief bent under the two pressures that test it most. The police offered him prayer as a road to safety in 1927, and he refused it. The gallows offered him prayer as comfort in 1930, and he refused that too, while admitting freely that God gives men a strength they must otherwise find in themselves. The change he did make in his last months was to his politics: he came to think that bombs had been a mistake of method, and said so. His unbelief came, as he told it, from reading: from a crisis in his movement that sent him to Bakunin and Marx for arguments, and from a habit of mind that would not accept on faith what it had not reasoned through. It was the same habit that made him answer his friends' charge of vanity with an essay rather than a denial.

Charles Bradlaugh, the English atheist who was called the Member for India, has his own chapter in this book.