There was a serious breach of security in Parliament on Wednesday (December 13), as two individuals jumped from the visitor’s gallery into the Lok Sabha chamber, shouting slogans and opening a canister that emitted yellow smoke. The motives of the group that also comprised four other individuals are yet to be established, but police sources said the act was “apparently inspired by Bhagat Singh”. The ostensible objective of the group was to protest various issues, from Manipur to farmers’ concerns. More than 94 years ago, the legendary Bhagat Singh rocked the British Empire when he hurled two feeble bombs into the chamber of Delhi’s Central Assembly, referred to officially as the Indian Parliament. Along with his Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) comrade Batukeshwar Dutt, he also threw revolutionary pamphlets into the chamber and raised patriotic slogans. This is how one of the most heroic and daring acts of the Indian freedom movement was carried out. The ‘Indian Parliament’ in 1929 “The situation in India early in 1929 was of a trying character,” Dr P Sitaramayya, historian of the Indian National Congress, recalled in his 1946 book. The Montague-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 had not yielded the autonomy that the Indian nationalists demanded — while Indians sat in the legislature, they wielded little power. For revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh this was exactly why one could not ‘negotiate’ with the British in good faith. “Without repeating the humiliating history of the past ten years… and without mentioning the insults hurled at the Indian nation through this House-the so-called Indian Parliament, we want to point out that, while the people expecting some more crumbs of reforms… the Government is thrusting upon us new repressive measures like the Public Safety and the Trade Disputes Bill,” the HSRA pamphlets thrown onto the House by Bhagat Singh stated. The revolutionaries wanted to ‘make the deaf hear’ The HSRA, the revolutionary organisation headed at the time by Chandrashekhar Azad, decided to deliver a strong message against the sham of an Indian Parliament that was being run at the time. “It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear, with these immortal words uttered on a similar occasion by Valiant, a French anarchist martyr, do we strongly justify this action of ours,” the HSRA pamphlet that Bhagat Singh and Dutt threw into the House began. The idea was not to kill or hurt anyone — it was simply to make a point that would reverberate across the British Empire. “In these extremely provocative circumstances, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association… had decided and ordered its army to do this particular action, so that a stop be put to this humiliating farce and to let the alien bureaucratic exploiters do what they wish, but they must be made to come before the public eye in their naked form,” the pamphlet read. The fateful day: April 8, 1929 On that fateful day, the Viceroy Lord Irwin was set to make a proclamation, enacting the Public Safety and the Trade Disputes Bills, even though the majority of members in the Assembly had opposed them, and both had been rejected earlier. The revolutionaries' actions in the House were well-planned. The police report stated that both Singh and Dutt had carried out “preliminary reconnaissance” two days prior. On that day, they were dressed in khaki shirts and shorts, and seated in the visitor’s gallery overlooking the chamber of the House. “Two bombs were thrown in quick succession to land behind the Home Member, James Crerar. Pandemonium broke loose on the Official Benches,” the legal scholar A G Noorani wrote in The Trial of Bhagat Singh (1996). After lobbing the two bombs, Singh also fired two unaimed shots from a pistol, all while Dutt showered the chamber with the HSRA pamphlets. Both shouted “Inquilab Zindabad” (Long live the Revolution) and “Down with British Imperialism”. As planned, both Dutt and Singh made no attempt to escape, and were easily arrested. The punishment: life in prison Following criticism of their action, Bhagat Singh and Dutt responded: “We hold human life sacred beyond words. We are neither perpetrators of dastardly outrages . nor are we ‘lunatics’. 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.” The trial began a month after the incident. On June 12 that year, both revolutionaries were sentenced to life in prison. Bhagat Singh would later also face charges relating to the murder of British police officer John Saunders, in Lahore in 1928 — which would get him a death sentence. He was hanged in Lahore Central Jail on March 23, 1931.
