Bhagat Singh's Bombs in the Assembly Hurt Six People and Killed No One. The Viceroy Answered With an Ordinance.

At 12.30 on Monday, 8 April 1929, writes Chaman Lal, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University who has edited Bhagat Singh’s papers, the President of the Central Legislative Assembly rose in the Council House in Delhi to give a ruling. The House had just passed the Government’s Trade Disputes Bill by 56 votes to 38. “As the Trade Disputes Bill is now out of the way,” Vithalbhai Patel said, “I propose to give my ruling.” The official report then prints a bracketed note: “At this stage two bombs were thrown from the Visitors’ Gallery, and burst among the Benches occupied by the Official Members, causing injury to certain Members. Confusion prevailed and Mr. President retired.”

The two men in the public gallery, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt, had thrown them. They shouted slogans, threw leaflets and waited to be arrested. This piece follows the bombs and what the Raj did with them over the next two years, using the Assembly’s debates, the Viceroy’s speeches and the Government’s own gazette notices. Bhagat Singh’s life and the Saunders case are in the shorter portrait.

Two bills the Raj wanted passed

The Public Safety Bill had already failed once. By the Viceroy’s own statement of 13 April 1929, the first version, brought in September 1928, “was rejected by the casting vote of the President.” A second version, with added powers to seize money sent from abroad, went to a Select Committee early in 1929 by a majority of 11 votes.

The Indian Annual Register, a yearly chronicle of Indian affairs, says the bill was meant “to deport at India’s expense foreigners whose stay in India was politically obnoxious.” Two men from Britain, Bradley and Spratt, appear in its account as helping to organise labour. Shortly before the bombs, the Government had charged 31 alleged Communists in the Meerut conspiracy case. Patel advised the Government either to postpone the bill until that trial ended or to withdraw the case. Irwin’s statement records the answer. The Government “could not contemplate the withdrawal of a criminal case, the decision of which they regarded as essential in the public interests.”

The Trade Disputes Bill, which passed on 8 April, made it a criminal offence for monthly-paid workers in public utilities to strike without notice. It also made illegal any strike or lockout that went beyond a dispute inside one industry and was meant to coerce the Government or hurt the community. Sir Bhupendra Nath Mitra, the Government’s member for industries and labour, described it that way, as the Register summarises his speech. Their leaflet named both measures, “new repressive measures like the Public Safety and the Trade Disputes Bill.”

Bombs into empty benches

The night before, Chaman Lal writes, Sukhdev brought three people from Lahore to Delhi to see Bhagat Singh “for the last time”: Bhagwati Charan Vohra, his wife Durga Bhabhi and Susheela Didi. In Kudsia Gardens the next morning they fed him rasgullas and oranges, he left for the Assembly about 10.30, and he and Dutt took their seats in the visitors’ gallery.

Two bombs went off. Chaman Lal lists the slogans as “Inquilab Zindabad,” “Down With Imperialism” and “Workers of the World Unite.” The Assembly’s record says only “injury to certain Members.” Six names appear in court and police records, Chaman Lal writes, among them Sir George Schuster, the Finance Member, and Sir Bomanji Dalal, and medical reports called the injuries “trivial.” Bhagat Singh and Dutt put it lower, “slight abrasions in less than half a dozen cases.” Nobody was killed.

Their statement gives the reason. Both bombs, they said, “exploded in vacant spaces within the wooden barriers of the desks and benches.” Members who sat within two feet of the blast, among them Schuster, Rau and Shankar Rao, were “either not hurt or only slightly scratched.” They added that they could have thrown the bombs into the official box, or at Sir John Simon of the Simon Commission, who they said was sitting in the President’s gallery.

Their leaflet, headed “Hindustan Socialist Republican Army,” opened with the line “It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear,” and attributed it to Vaillant, a French anarchist. It told the Government that “it is easy to kill individuals but you cannot kill the ideas,” and was signed “Balraj, Commander-in-Chief,” the pen name of Chandrashekhar Azad. Chaman Lal says Bhagat Singh typed ten to fifteen copies and had them delivered to reporters, and that the Hindustan Times brought out a special evening edition that day.

One detail is contested. According to the Register, “pistol shots” were fired in the air. The accused said that when they gave themselves up neither had a pistol, and that Sergeant Terry’s evidence of seizing one was “a deliberate falsehood.” Chaman Lal writes that Bhagat Singh had a pistol in his hand and put it on a side table when he saw the police officers’ fear.

The ruling

Thursday 11 April brought the Assembly back. Patel opened with the words “We meet today under the shadow of a great tragedy which, but for the merciful intervention of Providence, would have resulted in consequences the seriousness of which it is not difficult to imagine.” Members unanimously adopted his motion recording its “horror and indignation at the dastardly outrage” and its sympathy for “Sardar Sir Bomanji Dalal and others who received injuries.”

Then he read his ruling on the Public Safety Bill. The Government had refused his advice, he said, “and a conflict has thus become unavoidable.” He called the Government’s position “calculated to undermine the authority of the Chair.” With the Meerut case before a court, he held, no real debate on the bill was possible without discussing it. Letting the debate start would have “all the appearance of a farce and a fraud.” He ended: “I therefore rule it out of order.”

A message from the Viceroy followed, summoning members to the chamber the next morning. The record notes that the Congress Party members stayed in their seats while it was read. Patel told them that “Courtesy requires that we should stand.” Motilal Nehru answered: “We stand because you request us to do so.”

The Viceroy, the miracle and section 72

Lord Irwin spoke, on Friday 12 April, in the Assembly Chamber, to both Houses together. He thanked “the merciful protection of an over-ruling Providence that the designs of wicked men should have been, as it seems, so unaccountably and miraculously frustrated.” Irwin called the bomb “a cruel and hideous expression of the gospel of physical violence.” Because it was aimed at the Assembly, “a direct threat has thus been levelled at the whole constitutional life of India and everything which that life includes.”

Maclean reads the next passage as aimed at Motilal Nehru’s failure to condemn the bombing outright. “But if there be reprobation, let it be unqualified. To condemn a crime in one breath, and in the next to seek excuse for it by laying the blame on those against whom it is directed, is no true condemnation.”

Next came the President. His reading of the rules, Irwin said, did not match their original intention, and the Government would amend them so that a President could not block legislation except by express rule. Meanwhile, “with a full knowledge of much that can necessarily not now be publicly disclosed,” he had “decided after careful review of all the facts to avail myself of the authority conferred upon the Governor-General under Section 72 of the Government of India Act, in order to issue an Ordinance.”

The two accused answered him on 6 June. Police officers had told them what the Viceroy said, that the act was aimed at an institution and no individual, and they “readily recognized that the true significance of the incident had been correctly appreciated.” On the word miracle they were blunter. Government experts had put the result down to one, but they saw “nothing but a precisely scientific process,” and “the miracle consisted in no more than the deliberate aim which landed them in safe places.”

The bill the President blocked became an ordinance

The Public Safety Ordinance appeared in a Gazette of India Extraordinary on 13 April, five days after the bombs. In the Register’s words it “reproduced the Public Safety Bill as amended by the Select Committee.” Its preamble declares that “an emergency has arisen,” and it lets the Governor-General in Council order a person out of British India and seize money sent from abroad.

It also had limits. An “excepted person” was an Indian British subject, a British subject who had lived in India five years, or a subject of an Indian state. The Ordinance did not apply to any of them, so no Indian British subject or subject of an Indian state could be removed under it. Its target was foreigners who “directly or indirectly” advocated overthrowing the Government by force, or who sought “to foment or utilise industrial or agrarian disputes” for that end. The accused saw a wider pattern. Their statement points to “the wholesale arrests of the leaders of the labour movement.”

What Indian leaders said

Gandhi’s statement in Young India of 18 April said that “the bomb throwers have discredited the cause of freedom in whose name they threw the bombs,” according to Kama Maclean, who cites it to volume 40 of his Collected Works. Two days after the bombs, Maclean writes, Motilal Nehru, then Congress president, said the real India did not believe in the cult of the bomb and put the choice this way: “The choice lies between Gandhi and ‘Balraj.’” Jawaharlal Nehru answered the Viceroy in Allahabad, picking up Irwin’s phrase about a “naked conflict” of philosophies. “It is absurd,” he said, “to talk of unqualified condemnation of the young men who did it.”

A statement the judge cut

The trial opened on 7 May, Chaman Lal writes. Asaf Ali represented Dutt, and Bhagat Singh conducted his own defence in consultation with him. Asaf Ali read their joint statement in court on 6 June. “Revolution is an inalienable right of mankind,” it said. “Freedom is an imperishable birth right of all.” It gave their “sole purpose” as “to make the deaf hear” and to give “the heedless a timely warning,” and it said “we hold human life sacred beyond words.”

The Sessions Judge, J. Middleton, struck parts of it from the record on 9 June. Maclean cites his marked-up copy of the statement in the National Archives of India. On 12 June Middleton sentenced both men to transportation for life, Chaman Lal records, and the High Court dismissed their appeal on 13 January 1930.

Sixty-three days

Once in prison, Bhagat Singh and Dutt began a hunger strike for the facilities they had had in Delhi jail, Chaman Lal writes. When the Lahore Conspiracy Case hearing opened on 10 July, Bhagat Singh was carried in on a stretcher after 25 days without food. The other accused joined the strike from 13 July.

Sir James Crerar, the Home Member, asked the Assembly to add a section 540-B to the Code of Criminal Procedure on 12 September. Jinnah described it as a bill to let a trial go on in the accused’s absence. The defence briefs in the Lahore case had been withdrawn, Crerar said, and “at one time no less than thirteen of the sixteen accused were on hunger-strike and incapable of appearing before the court.” If the tactic “is allowed to succeed,” he warned, “the example will be followed in many cases in future.”

Jinnah opposed it. “The man who goes on hunger-strike has a soul,” he said. “He is moved by that soul and he believes in the justice of his cause.” He added: “Mind you, Sir, I do not approve of the action of Bhagat Singh, and I say this on the floor of this House.” What the people resented, he said, was “this damnable system of Government.” Two days later he told the House, “This is the farce which you propose to enact under this procedure.”

Jatindra Nath Das died in Lahore’s Borstal Jail on 13 September, on the 63rd day of his strike, according to The Tribune’s account. On 14 September Motilal Nehru moved the adjournment of the House over the Government’s handling of the Lahore prisoners. “Our benign Government has gone one better than Nero,” he said. “It is fiddling on the death-beds of these youngmen, misguided they may be, but patriots they are all the same!” The House adopted the motion, 55 votes to 47. The contents page of the same volume lists the Criminal Procedure bill as “Circulated” on 16 September, sent out for public and legal opinion instead of passed.

The Tribune says the final procession in Calcutta drew five lakh people, citing contemporary reports. Maclean told the paper that after Das’s death “the British stopped handing over bodies of revolutionaries to their kin.”

A court that could sit without the accused

The Government gazetted, on 1 May 1930, the Lahore Conspiracy Case Ordinance, its third ordinance in under two weeks, after one for Bengal on 19 April and one on the press on 27 April. Gandhi had lifted salt at Dandi on 6 April, a story told in the piece on the salt tax. Lord Irwin again cited section 72. His statement said the hearing before the Magistrate had run more than nine months and examined about 230 witnesses of a probable 607. It listed the charges: the murder of Saunders and of a head constable, bomb factories at Lahore and Saharanpur, and “a conspiracy leading to the throwing of two bombs in the Legislative Assembly on the 8th April 1929.”

The ordinance sent the case to a special tribunal of three High Court judges. The tribunal could go on in the absence of any accused who had made himself incapable of appearing or behaved in a persistently disorderly manner, and, in the Register’s words, “there shall be no appeal.”

Bhagat Singh answered the Governor-General in writing the next day. The hunger strike, he said, “had nothing to do with the trial.” Then he added: “As far as this Ordinance is concerned, we consider it to be our victory.” To him it was “the frank admission of the Government” that “fair chances for defense could not be given to the political accused.”

The tribunal opened on 5 May. On 12 May the presiding judge, Justice Coldstream, ordered the accused handcuffed, and police removed them from court by force. The next day Justice Agha Haider dissociated himself from the order. By 25 June, Bhagat Singh and Dutt wrote to the tribunal, two judges “have withdrawn or have been made to withdraw,” and Justice Hilton, who they said was a party to the order, was presiding. The verdict came on 7 October 1930. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were sentenced to death, seven others to transportation for life, two to shorter jail terms (seven years for one of them), and three were acquitted.

The Government’s own weekly review of the civil disobedience movement, which the Register reprints, treated the demonstrations that followed as a danger: “Whatever may be the motive which prompts these demonstrations they can hardly fail to give encouragement to the terrorist movement.” The week after, it noted that “a section of the press is extolling the convicts as heroes.”

A wall broken at night

Three days after the hanging, on 26 March 1931, Irwin addressed the Chelmsford Club in Delhi. “I take full responsibility for the decision at which Government arrived,” he said, and told the guests he “could imagine no case in which, under the law, the penalty had been more directly deserved.”

The three men were hanged in Lahore Central Jail at 7.15 p.m. on 23 March, a day earlier than scheduled, according to the Ferozepur district administration’s own page on the memorial at Hussainiwala. Its account says the jail authorities broke through the back wall of the jail and “secretly brought the dead bodies” to the bank of the Sutlej “for an unceremonial cremation.”

Harish Jain, an editor of a series of volumes on Bhagat Singh, tells The Tribune that the British refused to hand over political prisoners’ bodies after the Das procession and that this is why the three were cremated at midnight on the Sutlej. The Intelligence Bureau’s director, Sir Horace Williamson, wrote four years later, as Harish Puri quotes him from A.G. Noorani’s book, that “his photograph was on sale in every city and township and for a time rivalled in popularity even that of Mr Gandhi himself.”