We offered to help his brother cremate him, but he was terrified and went ahead with the caravan. “A young man was shot dead near my field. One set killing Muslims, another trying to save them from the attackers,” says Bhagat Singh. “There were two sets of people here in August 1947. R of the Garhshankar police station recorded only 101 deaths.” “In Simbli village just four kilometres away,” says schoolteacher, writer, and local historian Ajmer Sidhu, “about 250 people, all of them Muslims, were butchered in two nights and one day.” Yet, says Sidhu, who is with us when we interview Bhagat Singh Jhuggian, “of these, the “The caravan of people in countless thousands leaving to cross the border was frequently attacked, people slaughtered. The old gentleman fights his tears as he speaks of the mayhem and mass murder of the time. It’s when talking about that period that Bhagat Singh Jhuggian gets most emotional. “At that end also they gave me a heavy bag of food and other supplies to carry across the same distance to comrades in our network.” His family also provided food and shelter to underground fighters. Between working on his family’s five acres, “I would do anything they asked me to do.” One of those things, while still a teenager, was walking over 20 kilometres in darkness carrying a small, dismantled and “horribly heavy” printing press in two sacks to a secret camp of the revolutionaries. In the years after his expulsion from school, the young Bhagat Singh Jhuggian became a courier for the revolutionary underground. In May 1942, the Kirti Party merged with the Communist Party of India.Īnd no, Jhuggian was not named after the great Bhagat Singh, though, he says, “I grew up hearing people sing songs of him – there were many.” He even recites a few words of one from that period on the great revolutionary who was hanged by the British in 1931 when his tiny namesake was just three years old. Among its most distinguished journalist contributors was the other, legendary Bhagat Singh, who in fact ranįor three months before his arrest on May 27, 1927, when it had lost its editor. On returning to a Punjab where the Ghadar movement had been crushed, they started a publication called The Kirti Party comprised many who had gone to revolutionary Russia for military and ideological training. He joined one known as the Kirti Party, an offshoot of the Ghadar Party that had staged the Ghadar revolt of 1914-15 in the state. Groups from Punjab’s radical underground began to contact him. Though at first he went and worked on his family’s farm – his fame had spread. That he was free to do so had not gone unnoticed. Didn’t he feel awful about it? Well, he says, “my reaction was – now I am free to join the anti-British struggle.” He smiles at the recollection of the drama, speaking to us at his home in Ramgarh village of Hoshiarpur district. Bhagat Singh Jhuggian never returned to formal education for the rest of his extraordinarily colourful and ongoing life.īut he was and remains at age 93, a star pupil of the school of hard knocks. , Ghulam Mustafa, made strenuous efforts on his behalf. Many besides his parents begged the authorities to reverse their decision. This simply meant no school – and there weren’t too many around – would ever let the blacklisted Bhagat Singh Jhuggian enter their gates. The letter confirmed his expulsion, describing him as ‘dangerous’ and a ‘revolutionary’ – at age 11. The local schools authority – someone we might today call the block education officer – issued a letter with the assent of the deputy commissioner in this part of what is now Hoshiarpur district in Punjab. The other students present stared in shocked silence, and then ran away. He was thrashed then and there by the Munshi Babu himself, and thrown out of the Government Elementary School, Samundra. The consequences of his impudence were immediate. Young Bhagat Singh – not to be confused with his legendary namesake – faced the audience at the ceremony and yelled: “Britannia Murdabad, Hindustan Zindabad.” The Munshi patted him on the head and asked him to shout ‘Britannia Zindabad, Hitler Murdabad’. This was Punjab in 1939, he was just 11 years old, and a student of Class 3, which he had topped. He was on stage to receive his prize – a shiny one-paisa coin – from the Munshi, a senior officer with several schools under his control.
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