by RADHA D’SOUZA
Bhagat Singh as he appeared in 1929 after cutting his hair in Lahore to escape detection by police PHOTO/Wikipedia
Left Traditions in South Asia
Bhagat Singh is to South Asia what Che Guevara is to Latin America — a popular iconic figure who continues to inspire generations of youth in the subcontinent in their struggles against imperialism and the trajectory of national politics after independence. In India successive generations of social justice movements have taken the name Naujawan Bharat Sabha (Youth Society of India), the organisation founded by Bhagat Singh and his comrades in 1926. The Naujawan Bharat Sabha phase in the lives of many of us left an indelible mark in the kind of choices we made in later life. During Bhagat Singh’s times the British Left were familiar with the figures in the nascent Indian Left movements. Three British communists were imprisoned and tried along with Indian communists in the Meerut Conspiracy Case decided in 1933 under the anti-terrorism laws introduced by the colonial government. The trial inspired the Red Megaphone street theatre group in Manchester to stage a play titled Meerut.1 International interest in the South Asian Left faded somewhat after World War II.
In India the radical Left tradition never died down. The first action by the Indian state after independence was to send armed forces to the Telangana region in Southern India to put down the revolutionary movement there. The Telangana armed struggle liberated 3,000 villages spread over 16,000 square miles, home to a population of 3 million people, and held the region from 1946 to 1951.2 It was put down by one of the bloodiest repressions in a context when independence was still under negotiation and the constitution was being written. The trials of 10,000 Telangana insurgents kept the movement alive until the Naxalbari, Srikakulam and other revolts from 1969 onwards infused the revolutionary tradition with renewed energy. Once again India witnessed one of the bloodiest armed state repressions, and India contributed a new phrase, ‘encounter killings’, to the English vocabulary. In the aftermath of the repression many on the international Left wrote off the radical Left in India. With globalisation and the renewed corporate invasion of India, however, the radical Left resurged again under the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The point to note here is that in India figures like Bhagat Singh are important factors in the resilience of the radical Left. Bhagat Singh does not leave a “legacy” in that he is not a memory from the past. Bhagat Singh lives in the struggles, its songs and stories, in Telangana, Naxalbari, the Central Indian plains and elsewhere in the subcontinent. His life and the lives of his comrades provide a frame of reference for contemporary youth to make sense of the nation they inherited after independence.
Monthly Review Zine for more