28/09/2026
"हवा में रहेगी मेरे ख़याल की बिजली,
ये मुश्त-ए-ख़ाक है फ़ानी, रहे रहे न रहे।"
"The lightning of my thoughts will remain in the air,
This handful of dust is mortal, whether it stays or not."
Today, on the birth anniversary of Shaheed Bhagat Singh, CITU salutes a young revolutionary who lived just 23 years but left an idea that no gallows could kill.
Born on September 28, 1907, he was moved as a child by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and by the martyrdom of the Ghadar hero Kartar Singh Sarabha. Yet what made him different from many brave revolutionaries of his time was his constant search for ideas. Comrade Shiv Verma recalled that he rarely had a moment without a book in his pocket. He studied Marx, Engels and Lenin. He moved from the romance of individual action towards the conviction that only the masses of workers and peasants could make a real revolution.
That is why his story is so close to the working class. In 1928 he pushed his comrades to adopt socialism as the goal and to rename their organisation the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.
In 1929, as strikes rose across the country, the British government tried to crush the working class. It arrested 31 communist and trade union leaders in the Meerut Conspiracy Case and brought the anti-worker Trade Disputes Bill and the Public Safety Bill in the Central Assembly. On April 8, right after the Trade Disputes Bill was passed, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two bombs in the Assembly. The bombs were meant to warn, not to kill, and no one was seriously hurt. The two did not run. They courted arrest to use the courtroom as a platform, raising the cries "Long Live Revolution", "Long Live the Proletariat" and "Down with Imperialism."
Bhagat Singh warned that if the British were merely replaced by Indian exploiters, workers and peasants would gain nothing. For him, revolution meant ending the exploitation of man by man. In his last testament he called the peasants and workers the real revolutionary armies and urged youth to organise them.
He was equally uncompromising on communalism. He held that religion is a private matter, and he fought communal politics and caste oppression in his writings. This message is badly needed today, when forces of hate try to divide working people.
On the eve of the gallows, he was reading a biography of Lenin. He is said to have told the jail official, "Wait a minute, one revolutionary is busy meeting another." He went to the gallows with Rajguru and Sukhdev on March 23, 1931.
Today, as workers face attacks through the Labour Codes, contractualisation and privatisation, and as communal polarisation is used to divert attention from real issues, Bhagat Singh's call to organise and struggle is more relevant than ever.
CITU pledges to carry forward his legacy through united working-class struggles against exploitation, communalism and imperialism.
Inquilab Zindabad! Long Live Revolution!
