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Journalism of Courage
On a chilly December morning, a number of visitors, including a family who came all the way from Maharashtra, were visiting the ancestral home of Bhagat Singh in a small village in Punjab.
At the village – Khatkar Kalan in Punjab’s Nawanshahr district (later renamed as Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar) – the visitors saw that almost every wall was painted with the images of the revolutionary freedom fighter or words attributed to him, such as “main ikk aisa inquilabi pagal haan, jo jail vich vi azad hai (I am one such mad revolutionary who is free even when in jail)”.
Visitors would have also seen several locked houses in the village, from where, like in many other Punjab villages, the youth have been moving out in search of better opportunities.
At the entrance of the village is a huge mural of Bhagat Singh, his father Kishan Singh and mother Vidyavati. From there, a path leads to his ancestral haveli – now a protected monument under Punjab’s culture department. On the other side of the village is a museum that also has his statue.
Bhagat Singh was born on September 28, 1907, and brought up at Chak 105, Banga village, Faisalabad (now in Pakistan). He never stayed very long at the haveli in Khatkar Kalan, but it is the only house directly linked to him that remains in India following Partition. He was hanged by the British at a jail in Lahore on March 23, 1931, when he was just 23.
The haveli in Khatkar Kalan was built by Bhagat Singh’s great-grandfather, Fateh Singh. According to village residents, before Bhagat Singh’s birth, his father Kishan Singh moved to Faisalabad.
However, Bhagat often accompanied his grandfather, Arjan Singh, to Khatkar Kalan during school holidays. After Partition in 1947, the family moved back to Khatkar Kalan and Bhagat Singh’s mother, Vidyavati, lived in the house alone for a long period. Bhagat was one among her nine children.
The brick haveli still has an old well and a chulha (earthen stove) still intact. It also holds several belongings of the family, such as a typewriter, charkha, oil lamp, old photos, and some utensils.
Outside the ancestral house, on a sprawling lawn developed by the government, sat a group of local residents. Among them was 71-year-old Balwant Singh.
“Bhagat Singh had thrown a bomb in the assembly to wake up the British government. A similar attack happened in our Parliament recently (two people had set off smoke canisters inside the House after jumping over from the visitors’ gallery). Every government must think over why those youths who did it were forced to do it,” Balwant said, adding, “Bhagat Singh’s ideology is still relevant because he stood for equality and will continue to live in the minds of people.”
He also said that younger people were leaving the village, just like other such villages in Punjab, and moving abroad “because there are drugs everywhere but no jobs”.
Another local resident, 81-year-old Mahinder Singh Sandhu said: “We did sewa of his mother till the very end, when she lived alone in this house. Later, Giani Zail Singh (former President of India) took her to Chandigarh…”
He also said the recent incident in Parliament was “proof that Bhagat Singh’s ideology is still alive”.
“It has been more than 70 years since our country got Independence, but still there is no security of livelihoods for youths,” Sandhu said.
The sarpanch of the village, Satnam Singh, said at least half the houses in the village were lying locked. “Even I am being told by my children to come to Canada, but my heart doesn’t allow it. We cannot blame them, because they are not getting good work opportunities here.”
Professor Chaman Lal, an expert on Bhagat Singh, said fighting for the rights of suppressed classes was in the revolutionary’s blood. “His paternal uncle, Ajit Singh, led ‘Pagri Sambhaal Jatta’ movement against anti-farmer laws of the British government, along with Lala Lajpat Rai, in 1907…,” Lal said.
“Every country, and every region has iconic figures who are admired and remembered always. For India, and more so Punjab, it is Bhagat Singh, because he is not just remembered for sacrificing his life for the country’s freedom, but is also the symbol of fearlessness,” he said.
In his last petition to the Punjab Governor in 1931, Bhagat Singh had written that even if the British leave India, the fight would go on as long as the exploration of human by a fellow humans don’t stop.
He wrote, ‘..Let us declare that the state of war does exist and shall exist so long as the Indian toiling masses and the natural resources are being exploited by a handful of parasites. They may be purely British Capitalist or mixed British and Indian or even purely Indian. All these things make no difference…. The war shall continue…’
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