The Sikh side, too, did far less than present-day rhetoric suggests. There were resolutions, impassioned editorials, and pockets of protest in Punjab. There was no shortage of emotional invocation of the man who would later be hailed as Shaheed-e-Azam. Speeches were made, sentiments were expressed, and grief was publicly displayed.
What was absent, however, was a coordinated and sustained institutional campaign by the SGPC and the Akali Dal commensurate with the gravity of the moment. There was no pan-Indian, gurdwara-led mobilisation; no far-reaching movement of civil disobedience anchored in the very institutions that claimed to speak in the name of the Panth. The energy that had once shaken entrenched authority during the gurdwara reform movement did not translate into a determined programme to confront the Raj for three young Punjabis marching towards the scaffold.
Today, every party in Punjab seeks to appropriate Bhagat Singh. His portrait adorns platforms, offices, posters and manifestos; his hat and turban are alternately invoked depending on the politics of the hour. But in 1931, those same streams of political and religious leadership largely chose caution. They compartmentalised “religious” struggle and “constitutional” politics even as a son of Punjab, born in a Sikh Jat household, went to his death sustained less by institutions than by students, youth groups and small but fervent urban crowds.
The law: a stacked deck, and only a feeble challenge
On the legal front, the colonial state fought with ruthless purpose. Special tribunals were constituted by ordinance to try the Lahore Conspiracy Case. The normal right of appeal was sharply restricted. The full machinery of imperial law and order was brought to bear: special prosecutors, an army of assistants, police witnesses, and an apparatus designed not merely to prosecute but to ensure conviction. Approvers were extracted from within the revolutionary ranks, induced by promises of money, employment and even opportunities abroad.
Against this, the defence was fragmented, part conventional advocacy and part political theatre. Bhagat Singh and his comrades made a conscious choice to use the courtroom as a platform for revolutionary proclamation rather than to rely solely on technical legal manoeuvres, and that choice gave their trial a moral force that far exceeded its forensic limits. Yet beyond scattered petitions and one final, unsuccessful move before the Privy Council, there was no serious institutional legal counter-offensive. Congress did not create one. Punjab’s leading political and religious organisations did not create one. The broader nationalist establishment did not construct the sort of coordinated legal “war room” that a determined state power might have been made to reckon with.
In later years, every camp claimed that it had done what it could. Lawyers offered services, leaders signed appeals, moderates pleaded with the Viceroy. But from the vantage point of the gallows, the distinction is stark. The British fought as a state. The Indian leadership responded largely as petitioners.
The shadow of Lala Lajpat Rai and the silence of Karachi
Lala Lajpat Rai’s influence on Bhagat Singh is beyond dispute. The young revolutionary emerged from an intellectual and political environment shaped in no small part by Rai’s example and legacy. The lathi-charge that fatally injured Punjab Kesari became the emotional and political trigger for the act that led to Saunders’ assassination. In that sense, the killing of Saunders was not merely an act of revenge; it was the final chapter of Rai’s public life written in another man’s blood.
And yet, by the time the executions took place in Lahore, both the city and the Congress leadership had already moved into another register. At Karachi, Gandhi ji was received with black flags. Youth groups openly accused him of having bartered away Bhagat Singh in the cause of compromise. Congress, for its part, passed a carefully crafted resolution: it praised the courage of the martyrs, condemned violence as a method, and endorsed the Pact. It was a text designed to preserve equilibrium. Even at the time, it sounded strained. Today, it reads as moral evasiveness dressed up as balance.
The uncomfortable truth is that public sentiment was overwhelmingly with Bhagat Singh. Institutional sentiment, by contrast, remained tied to continuity, caution and business as usual.
“Inquilab Zindabad” and the comfort of selective memory
Today, Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh stands immortalised in statues at Hussainiwala and Khatkar Kalan. His name marks districts, colleges, airports and memorials. Rajguru and Sukhdev are remembered too, though too often as satellites orbiting a larger legend. Every ideological stream in modern India seeks to claim Bhagat Singh in some form: as socialist, nationalist, atheist, Sikh, secular icon, or revolutionary democrat.
What few wish to remember is that in 1931, nearly every major institution hedged its bets. Gandhi ji negotiated, but not to the point of rupture. Congress praised, but not to the point of political confrontation beyond its chosen constitutional framework. The SGPC and the Akali leadership spoke, passed resolutions and lamented the impending tragedy, but did not transform gurdwaras into the nerve centres of a sustained national uprising on behalf of the condemned.
Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev went to the gallows with clarity of mind, long since stripped of any illusion about British justice. The more unsettling question is whether they also overestimated the resolve of those who claimed to lead India and Punjab. On 23 March 2026, the least we can do is acknowledge a truth that still hurts: our martyrs were braver than our institutions. That, no less than the manner of their deaths, is why their story continues to wound the national conscience.