1 week Ago By Firstpost
The vile comments against one of India’s greatest heroes—Shaheed Bhagat Singh—filed in the Lahore High Court recently can never erode the place he has in the hearts of all Indians; they can enrage many, but all would dismiss them as the product of extreme anti-India prejudice that is inbuilt in the general Pakistani psyche. This is especially so in the Pakistan military but is also present in the Pakistan political class, obviously including those, like Punjab Chief Minister, Maryam Nawaz, and her father, Mian Nawaz Sharif, who is the supremo of the Pakistan Muslim League (N) and has thrice served as Pakistan’s Prime Minister and whose brother, Shahbaz Sharif, is the country’s current Prime Minister. If this were not so, the Lahore Metropolitan Corporation could not have filed such atrocious comments on Bhagat Singh based on a note of an ignorant and mischievous retired naval officer, Commodore Tariq Majeed.
Before mentioning the remarks made by Majeed, a background of the case, it has to be mentioned that there are a few—but only a few—well-meaning persons in Pakistan who take an objective view of the history of the Indian subcontinent during British colonial rule. They have formed a Bhagat Singh Foundation, which has been pleading with the government to name the Shadman Roundabout in Lahore as Bhagat Singh Chowk and also erect a statue of Bhagat Singh. The Foundation has held, for over two decades, that Bhagat Singh’s heroism is the common inheritance of the subcontinent.
Therefore, Pakistan should honour him as he is honoured in India. In this context, the Foundation asked the government to rename the Shadman Roundabout as the Bhagat Singh Roundabout to honour his memory. The Roundabout is built at the exact spot where Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru were hanged by the British in March 1931 in the Lahore Central Jail.
This jail building, according to a media report, was demolished in 1961, and the land of the jail was given for constructing a residential colony. The Foundation filed a case in 2012 in the Lahore High Court to order the government to rename the Shadman Roundabout in Bhagat Singh’s name. The court directed the concerned authorities to consider the Foundation’s request in accordance with the rules.
Clearly, they did nothing, though from time-to-time reports did appear that the Foundation’s plea was being considered sympathetically. When no action was taken on the court’s directions, the Foundation filed a contempt petition. The response of the Lahore Metropolitan Corporation in which the obnoxious remarks have been made against Bhagat Singh is in its submissions to the contempt petition.
Assistant Advocate General Asghar Leghari told the Lahore High Court that the plan to rename Shadman Square has been “scrapped” in the light of “observations” made by Commodore Tariq Majeed (Retd). Majeed informed the Lahore Metropolitan Corporation that Bhagat Singh was “not a revolutionary but a criminal, in today’s terms a terrorist. He killed a British police officer, and for this crime he was hanged along with two of his accomplices”.
He also stated that Bhagat Singh was anti-Muslim and an atheist and also that Islam does not permit statues of human beings. Majeed also advised the authorities that the Bhagat Singh Foundation should be banned because it is against Islamic ideology and Pakistani culture. The Foundation has said that it will move the courts against remarks made against it.
Separately, on the main case of renaming the Roundabout the Lahore High Court has posted the case for hearing on January 17, 2025. Right from the time the Foundation made the proposal for renaming the Roundabout some Islamic groups strongly opposed it. Their reasoning has been, more or less, the same as Majeed’s.
Neither the remarks of Majeed nor the opposition of Islamic groups against Bhagat Singh on the proposal are surprising. The fact is that Pakistan has become more and more a country where the most extreme versions of the Islamic faith, some of them wedded to violence, have gained great ground. Vivid examples of these are witnessed in the cases under the blasphemy laws, but what is most relevant to Majeed’s remarks is the manner in which the memory of Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of the then Governor of Punjab Salmaan Taseer, is being honoured.
Qadri was a police commando and was serving in the personal protection guard detail of Taseer. Taseer had met a Pakistani Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who had been convicted of blasphemy, in which the law makes the award of the death penalty mandatory. Many believed that the case was false.
Later, the Pakistan Supreme Court quashed the High Court judgement, and Asia Bibi was allowed to leave the country. But Taseer met Asia Bibi while she had been convicted, and the proceedings to acquit came afterwards. Qadri, enraged that Taseer had met and was apparently supporting a blasphemer, killed him in January 2011.
He was naturally arrested, but when he was taken to court after that, many lawyers showered rose petals on him. Qadri’s case went on for almost five years. All through this period, a very large number of the Pakistani people believed that what he did was correct because he had acted to uphold the honour of Islam and Prophet Mohamed.
Finally, the Islamabad High Court upheld the death sentence given to him, and he was executed in February 2016. The Islamist parties protested against his execution. His funeral was attended by an estimated ninety thousand people, even though the electronic media was banned from covering the funeral.
His body was buried in Bhara Kharu, on the outskirts of the capital. Soon it was converted into a shrine, and thousands of people visit it on a regular basis. Qadri’s son is perhaps the Sajjada-nashin of the shrine.
Majeed and the Pakistani authorities’ treatment of Qadri through allowing his grave to become a place of pilgrimage and in calling Bhagat Singh a ‘criminal’ reeks of hypocrisy. It especially exposes Pakistan because it shows their actual feelings for a great Sikh youth—Bhagat Singh—who embraced martyrdom at the young age of 23 and who was an intellectual as well as a man of action. He, along with others, killed a British officer for the brutal beating of Lala Lajpat Rai, one of the icons of the freedom struggle.
Lala Lajpat Rai is believed to have died as a result of that beating. Bhagat Singh’s Sikh background is important because the Pakistani establishment has been seeking to woo the patriotic Sikh community towards itself for over half a century. It also supports Khalistan.
It will never succeed, but it will continue to try. Hence, its actual sentiments towards Bhagat Singh now revealed are one more manifestation of the truth of its inimical feelings towards India and its people, including the Sikhs. It will be too much to expect that the Punjab government withdraws the remarks on Bhagat Singh from the court’s proceedings.
But that is the right course for it to take. It should realise that these remarks will remain in Indian memory forever. It is doubtful if it will because neither the Muslim League, nor the Pakistani establishment, nor its political class has ever been animated, as Bhagat Singh and other Indian freedom fighters were, by the immortal words of Ramprasad ‘Bismil’: Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil me hai Dekhna zor kitna bazua-katil me hai.
The writer is a former Indian diplomat who served as India’s Ambassador to Afghanistan and Myanmar, and as secretary, the Ministry of External Affairs. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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