Charkha, gun, a common link
MANINI CHATTERJEE
The revolutionary politics of Bhagat Singh, whose birth centenary was celebrated last week, had more in common with the satyagraha of Gandhi than we care to believe
In one of those quirky coincidences that history has a way of throwing up, two significant centenaries — marking seemingly conflicting streams of India’s freedom struggle — have come to overlap one another.
In a measure of the importance of the first centenary, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has gone to
Away from the limelight, the commemoration of another centenary has also begun. With the 75th anniversary of Bhagat Singh’s martyrdom on March 23 this year having gone largely unnoticed, left groups across the country are keen to ensure that his birth centenary — he was born on
If Mahatma Gandhi remains the indubitable Father of the Nation, Bhagat Singh has come to represent the forsaken son. Gandhi may have been loved and venerated by the masses but angry young Indians in the 1930s were bitterly disappointed with his attitude to the revolutionaries (or “terrorists”, as they were then described). It is still a matter of debate whether Gandhi was unable or unwilling to save Bhagat Singh and his comrades from the gallows. Many felt at the time that Gandhi ought to have insisted on commutation of their death sentence and release of the
That schism — pitting Gandhi against Bhagat Singh, the charkha versus the gun — has led generations to believe that the revolutionary or violent stream was antithetical to the Gandhi-led “mainstream” freedom struggle. Congressmen may commend the heroism and self-sacrifice of a Bhagat Singh or a Khudiram Bose but they retain the belief that the revolutionaries played, at best, a peripheral role in gaining
A closer study of the freedom struggle, however, reveals that far from being binary opposites, the two streams shared a rich, textured and nuanced relationship marked by both conflict and confluence at different points in history.
(Coutesy: Indian Express, 04 October 2006)
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Please correct the date of birth which should be 28th September, 1907.
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