23 March 1931: [Journalist] Virendra was at Lahore’s Central Jail, detained under the stringent Regulation III of 1818. The air in the prison and on the streets was loaded with a sense of unease – the die had been cast. It was the morning that the three fearless revolutionaries were to meet their end. “The day Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev were hanged it was my fortune or misfortune to be in the same jail,” says Virendra, in his historic first-person account.
After their appeal was rejected by the Privy Council and especially after Bhagat Singh refused to petition for mercy, we knew it was only a matter of time … There was this barber who used to go to shave Rajguru and Sukhdev and come to us also. [Bhagat Singh by then had started growing his hair again.] We got all our information through him, and he came on 20 March and told us that the end seemed near. He felt that the jail authorities were preparing for such an eventuality …
In front of where we were lodged, there was an open ground. The jail authorities had started collecting wood there. We thought that after the hanging the three would be cremated here. We tried to enquire from whichever jail official we could meet but received no satisfactory reply. No official was ready to open his mouth on this issue but there was an unusual bustle in the jail …
Outside the prison gates, Lahore was ill at ease and hardly noticed that it was spring. The hearts of its citizens were frozen with the certainty that doom was impending. A dust storm the night before had settled down as though it too was bowing to the inevitable. All that was left was for the family members of the three men to say their goodbyes and they were expected to come shortly to meet their sons – for one last time.
Virendra writes:
Newspapers on 23 March reported that relatives of the three revolutionaries had been informed that the hanging would take place the next day, 24 March so [they] could have their last meeting on 23 [March]. As per prison rules, the time of hanging was 7 am in the summer and 8 am in the winter months. Additionally, as per jail rules on the day of a hanging, other prisoners were to be kept locked up in their cells till the body was taken out of the jail compound.
Virendra and his fellow prisoners had no reason to believe otherwise. But an unassuming jail employee, Barkat the barber, was to shake him and other inmates out of their mournful stupor.
So, we thought that the hanging would be on the morning of 24 [March]. But on 23 March, at about 2 pm, the prison barber came running to us with tears in his eyes, and in a quivering voice said, “Sab kuch khatam ho gaya [Everything is over]. The Sardar is saying that they would probably be hanged today itself. He has conveyed Vande Mataram to the two of you.”
On hearing Barkat’s words Virendra and Ehsan Ilahi were distraught. They had accepted the hanging with drooping shoulders, but were not willing to see the intrepid revolutionaries die any sooner than they had to. Thoughts raced through their minds questioning the insidious move by the British to bring forward the execution by a day. With passions running high in the city, the British had quietly advanced the hangings by twelve hours.
Bringing his emotions under control, Virendra requested Barkat to go back to Bhagat Singh and ask him for a keepsake that the two young men could treasure as a remembrance. Half an hour later, the barber returned – in his hands were a black fountain pen and a comb. “On the comb, Bhagat Singh had carved his name with a blunt instrument. Ehsan Ilahi kept the pen and I, the comb.”
Time was moving and, yet, it felt like it had stood still. It was late afternoon and police officers were camping outside the gates of the Lahore Central Jail.
Every evening at 7 pm, chief warder Chattar Singh would lock us up, after securing all other prisoners. That day, he came at 4 pm When we asked him why he had come three hours early, he became emotional and could not speak. After several minutes, he composed himself and said the end had come; the three would be hanged that evening at 7 pm, there was nothing that could be done to save them now.
The warder left after locking the prisoners in, “we sat on our cots, totally silent”. Virendra and Ehsan Ilahi were accompanied by another undertrial, who was tasked to help them. They told him not to cook anything that day. Anguished, the men could only wait. The silence – theirs and of the other inmates – swept through every corner of the sprawling Lahore Central Jail.
The three who were to be hanged were kept in ward number 14. There was a furlong between that ward and where we were. Thus, we could not gather immediately what was happening but lodged next to number 14 were [the] accused in the second Lahore Conspiracy Case and they had a clearer picture.
Just before 7 pm, Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar were brought out and taken towards the phansi ghar. As they walked, they loudly shouted, “Inquilab Zindabad!” Hearing it, the other accused in the conspiracy case responded with equal gusto. Soon, the entire jail was reverberating with loud cries of “Inquilab Zindabad”. We too joined them. It spread even to the non-political prisoners, who started shouting the same slogan and it echoed across the jail. Then, there was deadly silence. That night, no one ate in the Central Jail of Lahore. And no one slept.
All the prisoners were overcome with thoughts of the final moments of the three extraordinary men and desperately sought information from anyone who would have it.
Only the chief warder Chattar Singh could tell us [about the hangings] as he was present at the spot. We waited for him to come and at 7 in the morning, he finally opened our locks. We had many questions to ask about how the three revolutionaries had approached death. Singh could not speak and then he burst out crying. With tears streaming down his face he said, “I am a government servant and I have seen many hangings, but I have never seen such bravery in facing the gallows before.”
The chief warder went on to tell Virendra and Ehsan Ilahi an incident that occurred shortly before the execution of Bhagat Singh. After wearing the uniform for the hanging, when the revolutionary came out of his cell, Chattar Singh made a request.
He said to him that as there were only a few minutes left of his life, he should remember Wahe Guru. Hearing him, Bhagat Singh laughed saying, “Sardar-ji, throughout my life I have never remembered him. Looking at the atrocities against the poor and the downtrodden, I may even have reprimanded Him sometimes. Now, with death standing right in front of me, if I remember Him, He will say that this young man is both dishonest and a coward. But if I do not change my views about Him, He would say that this young man was both honest and brave.” Saying this, Bhagat Singh started his walk towards the phansi ghar.
Bhagat Singh’s niece Virendar Sindhu provides more details of his dying moments.
Sitting in his cell Bhagat Singh was reading The Life of Lenin. A few pages were left when the lock to his cell was opened, and he was asked to get ready for his hanging. Bhagat Singh replied, “Wait. Let me read a few more pages. A revolutionary is going to meet another revolutionary.” He completed [the] book and then told the jail officials, “Chalo, let’s go.” The jail officials were all downcast, not so were the prisoners who were being led to the gallows. There was no trace of fear or sadness on their faces. Bhagat Singh requested that they not be handcuffed, and their faces not be covered. The requests were accepted. By that time Rajguru and Sukhdev also came out of their cells. They saw each other and hugged – Bhagat Singh in the centre, Sukhdev on the left, and Rajguru on his right – and with arms locked with each other they began walking. They stopped for a second and then burst out singing a song written by Lal Chand Phalak, “Dil se niklege n mur kar bhi watan ki ulfat, mere mitti se bhi khushbu-a-wafa aayegi.”
Led by the warder and surrounded by jail officials the three walked towards their end. One warder opened the door to the phansi ghar; the deputy commissioner of Lahore and a jail official named Muhammad Akbar were already inside. Bhagat Singh walked up to the British officer and said, “Mr Magistrate, you are fortunate to be able to see today how Indian revolutionaries can embrace death with pleasure for the sake of their supreme ideal.”
No magistrate was willing to witness the hanging – Bhagat Singh as India’s most admired son had monopolized the shrine of the greats. It was Nawab Muhammad Ahmed Khan Kasuri who did what others before him refused – he became an honorary magistrate and signed off on the execution. Uncannily, he was killed more than forty years later at the same spot where Bhagat Singh was hanged. Calling themselves prisoners of war, the three revolutionaries had asked to be executed by a firing squad. Their demand was rejected and Kala Masih – his son, Tara Masih, who later hanged Prime Minister Zulfikar Bhutto of Pakistan – stepped up as the hangman.
The three then climbed the platform where the noose [was] hanging and went and stood under them. With their own hands, they put the noose on their necks. Bhagat Singh had some difficulty in putting [on] the noose, so the hangman came forward and adjusted it. And then the wheel turned, and the board parted. And the three fell into eternal sleep at the feet of Mother India.
The time of death was 7.33 pm. Bhagat Singh was twenty-three years, five months, and twenty-six days old.
As a crowd began congregating outside the jail, the bodies were sneaked out in the darkness from a back gate. The remains of the three brave men had been chopped up into pieces and filled into sacks. These sacks were then loaded on a truck and taken to the banks of the Sutlej River in Ferozepur for a hasty cremation from where the half-burnt bodies were collected by Bhagat Singh’s sister and Lala Lajpat Rai’s daughter, among others. Final respects, befitting India’s bravest, were paid to the three martyrs in Lahore on the banks of the Ravi – an evergreen backdrop of India’s defiance against the Raj.
Virendra remembers in his book:
As per jail rules before his hanging, a prisoner is allowed to meet his relatives. On 23 March, Bhagat Singh’s father was informed that [his] son was to be hanged the next day, so they [his family] could come and have the last meeting with him that day. Sardar Kishan Singh reached the jail with all his relatives, including the grandparents of Bhagat Singh, and his uncles and aunts, but was told that only he and his wife, the mother, could meet him. He tried to persuade the jail authorities to allow all relatives to meet him but was informed that the orders were to allow only the parents to meet him. Sardar Kishan Singh refused to meet his son [–] after all, he was also the father of Bhagat Singh and did not want to show any weakness. They all returned from the jail gate without meeting their son.
In the evening, a huge public meeting took place near Mori Darwaza in Lahore, where Sardar Kishan Singh told the gathering about how he and his family came away without meeting with their son. As he was speaking, a man came to him and whispered in his ear that the three had been hanged. Sardar Kishan Singh fell silent for a moment, then controlling himself, he told the crowd, “I have just learned that what was to be done has been done. I am going to claim the body of Bhagat Singh. All maintain calm and peace. There should be no protests.” But who was prepared to listen to him? And how could he have claimed the body of his son? It was on its way to Hussainiwala to be consigned to flames on the banks of the Sutlej.
And that ended a glorious chapter of our revolution.
Excerpted with permission from Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper, Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan, HarperCollins India.
