Bhagat Singh: The Rebel Who Spoke In Silence

On September 28, Bhagat Singh’s birthday, when we remember him, we not only remember the young man who went to the gallows at the age of 23, but also an extraordinary mind compressed by history into a handful of years, yet able to live the intellectual journey of a lifetime. To recall him only as the assassin of Saunders or as the calm philosopher of Why I Am an Atheist is to fragment him. His true legacy lies in the movement between these moments—the restless becoming of a revolutionary who refused to repent.

In December 1928, when police officer J.P. Saunders was shot dead in Lahore, a poster soon appeared declaring, “Lala Lajpat Rai is avenged.” Bhagat Singh helped write it, but beyond that moment, he never spoke of Saunders again. Not in his writings, not in his letters, not even in court statements. This silence is striking, for here was a man who otherwise insisted on justifying revolutionary violence with manifestos and speeches. Why did he never defend Saunders’ killing in public? Was it guilt, as some memoirs later suggested, or was it something else—a deliberate refusal to let the incident define him? Sukhdev wrote candidly in private letters about the disappointment they felt when newspapers ignored their message, but Bhagat Singh himself never tried to correct the record. His silence resounded louder than words, and it was a silence that suggested not remorse but a strategic restraint. He had avenged Lajpat Rai, but he would not allow vengeance alone to script his revolution.

If 1928 was the year of the pistol, it was also the year of the pen. Bhagat Singh became a prolific writer, contributing to Punjabi journals like Kirti and Hindi magazines like Chand. He did not merely glorify martyrs; he excavated their histories from court records and official gazettes, turning them into weapons of political reclamation. The Babbar Akalis and the Kukas, once dismissed as fanatics, were reframed by him as precursors of the revolutionary tradition. This was not an antiquarian curiosity—it was part of a deliberate strategy to create continuity between past struggles and present defiance.

Amidst these writings, his most daring intellectual intervention was his three-part essay on anarchism published in Kirti in mid-1928, followed soon after by an essay on nihilism. Here he confronted head-on the widespread belief that anarchists were nothing but bloodthirsty destroyers. On the contrary, he argued, they were among the most selfless and humane of people, driven not by cruelty but by an uncompromising commitment to human emancipation. Even when people disagreed with their methods, no one could doubt their seriousness, truthfulness, or spirit of sacrifice. These were not abstract musings. They were self-portraits. In describing the anarchist, Bhagat Singh was describing the kind of revolutionary he sought to be: fearless, uncompromising, and morally compelled to act. The anarchist’s pistol was not an instrument of chaos but a badge of ethical defiance.

That is why his silence about Saunders should not be read as a contradiction. Bhagat Singh embodied multiple revolutionary selves: anarchist, socialist, communist, rationalist. These were not masks to be worn and discarded but coordinates on a single ideological map. Unlike Gandhi, who demanded that every follower replicate his own compass of morality, Bhagat Singh allowed himself the contradictions of a revolutionary in motion. Where Gandhi sought to centralise, Bhagat Singh decentralised. Where Gandhi made his own life the measure of all, Bhagat Singh’s life was an invitation to multiplicity. He was anarchist enough to strike at the empire with a pistol, socialist enough to dream of a transformed society, and rationalist enough to reject even the comfort of God when death approached.

The Assembly Bomb incident of April 1929 marked a turning point. Alongside B.K. Dutt, he threw harmless bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly, not to kill but to speak. “It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear,” their manifesto declared. If the Saunders episode was vengeance, the Assembly bomb was pedagogy. Violence had been transformed into symbolism. Instead of blood, they spilled words. Instead of retreating into silence, they seized the courtroom as a stage to explain their ideals. The contrast with December 1928 could not have been sharper. And yet, beneath both moments lay the same defiant core: the refusal to bow, the insistence on awakening the public. In the furnace of prison, this core only grew stronger.

It was in jail that Bhagat Singh’s metamorphosis accelerated. The long hunger strikes, the conversations with fellow prisoners, the hours with Marx, Lenin, Bakunin and Trotsky, the nearness of death—these compressed years into months, months into days. He wrote letters with remarkable clarity, weaving together the urgency of action with the depth of philosophical reflection. By October 1930, he produced his most enduring essay, Why I Am an Atheist. It was neither bravado nor despair, but the calm reasoning of a man who rejected divinity not out of arrogance but out of a commitment to truth. Even on the eve of death, he would not take refuge in God. His courage was inward now, but no less radical.

To see these phases as contradictions—avenger, bomber, philosopher—is to miss the ethical continuity that binds them. Bhagat Singh was not three different men but one revolutionary unfolding at high speed under the pressure of history. The same anarchist refusal that led him to pick up the pistol in 1928 guided his symbolic bomb in 1929 and his rationalist prose in 1930. Each phase was a new form of the same defiance. Revolutionary time is not linear; it accelerates thought. Where ordinary lives take decades to mature, his two years contained a lifetime of political and philosophical evolution. He had to live ten years in two, and he did.

On his birthday, we must resist the temptation to remember him in fragments. To recall him only as the young man who shot Saunders is to freeze him at his first defiance. To recall him only as the serene philosopher of Why I Am an Atheist is to forget the fiery youth who once believed in the sanctity of the pistol. The truth lies in the arc between these moments. He refused to repent, refused to be static, refused to surrender to any authority—imperial, political, or divine. His life was a continual becoming, a restless metamorphosis that turned vengeance into pedagogy and pedagogy into philosophy.

This is why Bhagat Singh endures. Not as a marble statue of the nation, but as a voice reminding us that freedom is never finished. His writings and actions insist that rebellion must constantly renew itself, that the courage to act must be matched by the courage to think, and that the revolutionary spirit is not a posture but a continuous refusal—refusal to bow, to accept falsehood, to surrender to fear. On September 28, to honour Bhagat Singh is to honour that refusal, and to recognise that his legacy is not only in what he did, but in what he refused to do: he refused to repent, and in doing so, left us a philosophy of freedom that continues to demand our courage today.

(views expressed are personal)

Harish Jain is a Chandigarh-based publisher and author. He has worked extensively on the writings and legacy of Bhagat Singh, bringing rare archival material to light and offering fresh historical insights.