Bhagat Singh

Bhagat Singh was only twenty-three years old when the British hanged him, but the ideas inside his young head were bigger than his short life. He grew up in Punjab in a family that already loved freedom, and he read piles of books about workers, farmers and fair societies.

He dreamed of an India where every person, rich or poor, had a real chance. From his prison cell he shouted the words 'Inquilab Zindabad' — 'Long Live the Revolution' — and that cry is still heard in India today.

Bhagat Singh was born in 1907 in a Sikh family in Punjab. As a teenager he joined the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, a group of young revolutionaries who wanted to end British rule quickly.

In 1928, after the freedom fighter Lala Lajpat Rai died from a police beating, Bhagat Singh and his friend Rajguru shot a British police officer named John Saunders to answer for that death.

In April 1929, along with Batukeshwar Dutt, he threw a low-powered bomb inside the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi. It was not meant to hurt anyone — it was meant, in his own words, 'to make the deaf hear'.

They deliberately allowed themselves to be arrested so they could use the trial to explain their ideas. From prison he wrote powerful essays including 'Why I am an Atheist', and led a hunger strike for the rights of political prisoners.

He was hanged on 23 March 1931 alongside Rajguru and Sukhdev, and became one of India's most loved young heroes.