Alluri Sitarama Raju to Bhagat Singh: Inquilab Zindabad

THE beginning of the 1920s had witnessed a great example of peasant guerrilla war in Andhra. From August 1922 to May 1924, Alluri Sitarama Raju and his band of hundred tribal peasant guerrillas waged a successful war against the British state over an area of about 2,500 square miles in the hills of the Godavari Agency region. With his accurate ambushes and successful raids on police stations, Raju won the grudging admiration of the British as a formidable guerrilla tactician. The Madras Government spent Rs. 15 lakh to suppress the rebellion with the help of the Malabar Special Police and the Assam Rifles. Raju was finally caught while he was bathing in a pond, and after inflicting heavy torture on this great fighter the British administration shot him dead on 6 May 1924. Incidentally, the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence also marks the birth centenary of this legendary peasant revolutionary.

If Alluri Sitarama Raju symbolised the courage and capacity of the rural poor to wage a militant battle for independence, Bhagat Singh held out a really potent promise of a much more meaningful freedom that could have been ours. In September 1928, he and his comrades set up the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army at a meeting held on the ruins of Delhi's Ferozeshah Kotla. In one of its first actions, the HSRA avenged the assault on Lajpat Rai (he was seriously injured by the police white leading an anti-Simon protest march at Lahore on 30 October, 1928 and finally succumbed to death on 17 November) by killing the guilty police official Saunders at Lahore in December 1928. On 8 April, 1929 Bhagat Singh and Batukeswar Dutta threw bombs in the Legislative Assembly even as discussion was on in the Assembly on the anti-labour Trades Disputes Bill and a bill to bar British communists and other supporters of Indian independence from coining to India.

While carrying out such specific terrorist actions under the HSRA banner, Bhagat Singh and his comrades also built up an open youth organisation in the name of Naujawan Bharat Sabha. Awaiting his execution in jail, Bhagat Singh undertook a systematic study of Marxism and wrote, among other things, the path-breaking pamphlet Why I Am an Atheist. The most remarkable thing about Bhagat Singh was that his transition from revolutionary terrorism to Marxism did not take place merely in the realm of abstract ideology, in the process he also showed every sign of developing a deep-going analysis of Indian society as well as a comprehensive revolutionary programme to transform it.

With his matchless patriotism, absolute determination, revolutionary heroism and tremendous leadership qualities, Bhagat Singh had the unmistakable potential of growing into a radical pole of the freedom movement and providing a real challenge to the political supremacy of Gandhi and Nehru. Congress made little attempts to save the life of this great revolutionary, but in the hearts of the people Bhagat Singh and his comrade Chandrashekhar Azad who gave many a slip to the British police but finally embraced martyrdom in the course of a surprise police encounter at the Alfred park of Allahabad, remain indisputably the two most legendary martyrs of India's independence struggle. Singh's clarion call, Inquilab Zindabad, has become the permanent war cry of every Indian struggle for justice, freedom and democracy.