‘Bhagat Singh’s is a story that needs to be told & retold’

New Delhi: Punjabi folklore is full of the brave deeds of the two ‘Shaheeds’ of Bhagat Singh and Udham Singh, who have legendary status, and as a young child, Satvinder Singh Juss grew up listening to stories about them from his grandfather. Upon arrival in the UK at the age of nine, he recalls the annual commemoration of them held by the Indian Workers Association in town halls across the country for the future of a free India and the unfulfilled promise that they came to represent.
“I remained enthralled by the story of Bhagat Singh’s fight for freedom. Yet it was a story that was not known at all within the mainstream historical accounts of India’s path to freedom in the way that stories of Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah were,” Juss, a Professor of Law at King’s College London, a practising Barrister and a Deputy Judge of the Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) in the UK, told IANS in an interview about his book, “Execution of Bhagat Singh – Legal Heresies Of The Raj” (HarperCollins).
This, Juss said, “was despite the irony that even today, surveys have consistently shown that more than anyone else, it is Bhagat Singh who is the most popular figure in India. An even greater irony is how even today, in both India and Pakistan, it is Bhagat Singh who is seen as the principal figure in any rallying cry for a reformed politics.
“Whenever there is talk of embracing the modern values of diversity, pluralism and tolerance it is the name of Bhagat Singh that is on everyone’s lips. For all these reasons, it seemed to me that Bhagat Singh was a story whose time had come. It was a story that had to be told and re-told,” he added.
Growing up, Juss remained fascinated by the way in which Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru went to their death (in the Lahore Conspiracy Case) and the way that they smilingly kissed the hangman’s noose, and putting it around their necks themselves — all of this is told in the popular stories of Punjab.
“What remained unclear to me was the manner of their death. As a lawyer I remained fascinated by this. I was not the only one. There were those before me who remained frustrated in the knowledge that the main documentary repository of Bhagat Singh lay not in India but in Pakistan,” Juss explained.