FOR Bhagat Singh, patriotism could not end with overthrowing the British. Rather, it meant continuing the struggle till India’s poor workers and peasants would rule the country.

Bhagat Singh warned against “a replacement of a white rule at Delhi by a brown rule,” saying that such a rule “once installed on the throne runs the risk of being petrified into a tyranny.” (‘To The Young Political Workers’, Bhagat Singh)

Bhagat Singh made it clear that his goal was not just to replace white rule with brown rule, he and his comrades wanted nothing less than revolution. And they boldly stated what they meant by revolution:

“‘Revolution’ is not the cult of the bomb and the pistol. By ‘Revolution’ we mean that the present order of things, which is based on manifest injustice, must change. Producers or labourers in spite of being the most necessary element of society are robbed by their exploiters of the fruits of their labour and deprived of their elementary rights. The peasant, who grows corn for all, starves with his family, the weaver who supplies the world market with textile fabrics, has not enough to cover his own and his children’s bodies, masons, smiths and carpenters, who raise magnificent palaces, live like pariahs in the slums. The capitalists and exploiters, the parasites of society, squander millions on their whims.” … - (from the text of Bhagat Singh and B K Dutt’s statement, read in the court by Asaf Ali on June 6, 1929)

Bhagat Singh made it clear in his February 1931 Message that what he spoke of was a socialist revolution:

“We want a socialist revolution, the indispensable preliminary to which is the political revolution. That is what we want. The political revolution does not mean the transfer of state (or more crudely, the power) from the hands of the British to the Indians, but to those Indians who are at one with us as to the final goal, or to be more precise, the power to be transferred to the revolutionary party through popular support. After that, to proceed in right earnest is to organise the reconstruction of the whole society on the socialist basis.”

What kind of revolutionary party did Bhagat Singh mean? Bhagat Singh wrote quite clearly that the party he saw as essential for freedom and revolution was the communist party conceptualized by Lenin:

“We require – to use the term so dear to Lenin – the “professional revolutionaries”. The whole-time workers who have no other ambitions or life-work except the revolution. The name …of such a party is the communist party. This party of political workers, bound by strict discipline, should handle all other movements. It shall have to organize the peasants’ and workers’ parties, labour unions…” (To Young Political Workers)

Today, young men and women who walk on Bhagat Singh’s path and join the communist movement, are being branded as seditious and anti-national by the BJP and RSS!


Bhagat Singh told the Lahore High Court:

“Bombs and pistols do not make revolution. The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting-stone of ideas”, and in his last Petition to the Punjab Governor, he asserted:

“….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 … till the Socialist Republic is established and … every sort of exploitation is put an end to and the humanity is ushered into the era of genuine and permanent peace.”