Bhagat Singh would have been a ‘Dimagi Naxal’ today

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 28 paid tribute to Bhagat Singh on his birth anniversary, praising the revolutionary’s indomitable courage and valour and his willingness to sacrifice everything for the honour of the nation. BJP leaders, too, invoked his patriotism, sacrifice, intellect and commitment to the country.

The tribute perhaps is familiar. The contradiction is not.

Bhagat Singh is perhaps one of the few revolutionaries whom almost every political camp wants to claim. But the Bhagat Singh celebrated in official commemorations is usually the martyr: fearless, patriotic, young and willing to die for India. The more inconvenient Bhagat Singh was the thinker — a socialist, Marxist-influenced revolutionary, atheist, rationalist and fierce opponent of communal politics.

That becomes more significant after Modi's recent invocation of the term 'dimagi Naxal'

In his Independence Day address, Modi said that while armed Naxalism had been curbed, 'dimagi Naxals' — people with a Naxal or Maoist mindset — were still looking for opportunities to create violence and push the country onto a wrong path. He said people harbouring Maoist ideology had entered institutions and influenced policymaking. Union minister Kiren Rijiju later narrowed the description to those who support Maoists and reject the Constitution, support separatism and Article 370, or seek to sever the Northeast from India.

Bhagat Singh was, of course, not a Naxalite. Naxalbari erupted years after his execution. He cannot historically be placed inside a movement that did not yet exist.

But the phrase raises a different question.

What if the statement was not chronology, but the politics of the mind?

Bhagat Singh's defining characteristic was precisely his refusal to inherit ideas unquestioned. History, describes his commitment to reason, critical thinking, secularism and socialism as central to his legacy, arguing that this intellectual Bhagat Singh has been repeatedly displaced by the safer image of the nationalist martyr.

He read relentlessly. He wrote about politics, economics, philosophy and society. His Why I Am an Atheist was an explicit defence of rational inquiry. His political evolution took him towards Marxism and socialism. The Naujawan Bharat Sabha, which he helped build, sought an independent republic of labourers and peasants, called for organising workers and peasants, and explicitly opposed communal sentiment.

His conception of revolution was even more disruptive.

In his final political statement of February 1931, Bhagat Singh made clear that revolution did not mean simply transferring power from British rulers to Indians. Its objective was the reconstruction of society on a socialist basis. The political revolution, in his formulation, was only the beginning of that transformation.

This is where the dimagi Naxal formulation becomes an uncomfortable historical mirror.

If the contemporary phrase is being used to identify a particular political mindset — radical left ideology, hostility to the existing social order, intellectual dissent and a belief in fundamental social transformation — then Bhagat Singh's writings contain several characteristics that would sit squarely inside that ideological terrain.

Not all of them, and not the government's specific allegations of Maoist violence, separatism or rejection of the Constitution. Those cannot be retroactively attributed to Bhagat Singh. But the broader idea of a young political thinker questioning the prevailing order, embracing socialism and demanding its structural transformation is unmistakably present.

That is not an interpretation imposed on him from the present. It is in his own political programme.

Bhagat Singh did not want merely an India without the British. He wanted an India without the social and economic structures that reproduced exploitation. He opposed communalism. He argued for workers and peasants as political subjects. He challenged religious orthodoxy. He insisted on reason.

Chaman Lal, Bhagat Singh's biographer, has similarly emphasised the distance between Bhagat Singh's Marxist conception of India and the Hindutva conception associated with V.D. Savarkar, while arguing that his fearlessness and political vision remain relevant to contemporary struggles.

This is precisely what gets lost when Bhagat Singh is reduced to a portrait, a slogan or a patriotic ritual.

There is nothing contradictory about remembering his sacrifice as part of India's freedom struggle. But remembering the sacrifice while removing the politics that gave that sacrifice its meaning produces a profoundly incomplete Bhagat Singh.

Political parties have every reason to invoke his nationalism. His intellectual inheritance is harder to appropriate.

Because the revolutionary being commemorated was not merely willing to die for the nation. He was willing to interrogate the nation he wanted to build.

And that leaves contemporary India with an awkward question: if a 'dimaagi Naxal' is defined by the political mindset that challenges established power, questions received orthodoxies and seeks radical social transformation, how far is that description from the Bhagat Singh whose writings are still available to us?

The irony is not that Bhagat Singh was a Naxalite.

The irony is that the Bhagat Singh being celebrated today may be the one version of him that his own ideas would have asked us to question.