What message did Bhagat Singh want to convey to the British through the statement made by him during his trial?
Answers
Answer:
Bhagat Singh coined a powerful slogan 'Inquilab Zindabad' which became the slogan of India's armed struggle. 9. He was hanged an hour ahead of the official time on March 23, 1931. It is said that Bhagat Singh was smiling when he was hanged
Answer:
The Trial started on 7 May, 1929. The Crown was represented by the public prosecutor Rai Bahadur Suryanarayan and the trial magistrate was a British Judge, P.B Pool. The manner in which the prosecution presented its case left Bhagat Singh in no doubt that the British were out to nail him. The prosecution’s star witness was Sergeant Terry who said that a pistol had been found on Bhagat Singh’s person when he was arrested in the Assembly. This was not factually correct because Bhagat Singh had himself surrendered the pistol while asking the police to arrest him. Even the eleven witnesses who said that they had seen the two throwing the bombs seemed to have been tutored.
Some of the questions asked in court were:
Judge: ‘Were you present in the Assembly on the 8th of April, 1929?”
Bhagat Singh: ‘As far as this case is concerned, I feel no necessity to make a statement at this stage. When I do, I will make the statement.”
Judge: ‘When you arrived in the court, you shouted, “Long Live Revolution!”. What do you mean by it?’
As if it had already made up its mind, the court framed charges under Section 307 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 3 of the Exposive Substances Act. Bhagat Singh and Dutt were accused of throwing bombs ‘to kill or cause injuries to the King Majesty’s subjects’. The magistrate committed both of the revolutionaries’ to the sessions court, which was presided over by Judge Leonard Middleton. The trial started in the first week of June, 1929. Here also, Bhagat Singh and Dutt were irked by the allegation that they had fired shots from a gun. It was apparent that the government was not limiting the case to the bombs thrown in the Assembly. It was introducing extraneous elements to ferret out more information about the revolutionary party and its agenda.
However, Judge Leonard Middleton too swallowed the prosecution story. He accepted as proof of the verbal testimony that the two had thrown the bombs into the Assembly Chamber and even said that Bhagat Singh fired from his pistol while scattering the leaflets there. The court held that both Bhagat Singh and Dutt were guilty under Section 3 of the Explosive Substances Act, 1988 and were sentenced to life imprisonment. Judge Middleton rules that he had no doubt that the defendant’s acts were ‘deliberate’ and rejected the plea that the bombs were deliberately low-intensity bombs since the impact of the explosion had shattered the wood of one and a half inch thickness in the Assembly.
The two were persuaded to file an appeal which was rejected and they were sent for fourteen years. The judge was in a hurry to close the case and claimed that the police had gathered ‘substantial evidence’ against Bhagat Singh and that he was charged with involvement in the killings of Saunders and Head Constable Chanan Singh and that the authorities had collected nearly 600 witnesses to establish their charges against him which included his colleagues, Jai Gopal and Hans Raj Vohra turning government approvers.
Bhagat Singh was sent to Mianwali Jail and Dutt to Borstal Jail in Lahore and were put on the same train though in different compartments on 12th March, 1930 but after requesting the officer on duty to allow them to sit together for some distance of the journey, Bhagat Singh conveyed to Dutt that he should go on a hunger strike on 15th June and that he would do the same in Mianwali Jail. When the Government realized that this fast had riveted the attention of the people throughout the country, it decided to hurry up the trial, which came to known as the Lahore Conspiracy Case. This trial started in Borstal Jial, Lahore, on 10 July, 1929. Rai Sahib Pandit Sri Kishen, a first class magistrate, was the judge for this trial. He earned the title of Rai Sahib for loyal service to the British. Bhagat Singh and twenty-seven others were charged with murder, conspiracy and wagering war against the King.