Punjab in the early twentieth century produced no shortage of men willing to go to prison for their politics. Lala Lajpat Rai went further than most: he went to prison, into exile, back into public life, and eventually into a Lahore street where a police officer's baton did what four decades of colonial administration had failed to do, which was to remove him from the fight entirely. He did not live to see independence, or even to see the movement he had helped radicalise reach its most famous act of retaliation. But that act happened in his name, within weeks of his death, and it is difficult to tell the story of Bhagat Singh without first telling his.
A Lawyer from Dhudike
Lajpat Rai was born on 28 January 1865 in the village of Dhudike, in what is now Moga district, the son of an Urdu and Persian teacher. He trained as a lawyer and began practice in Hisar in 1886, and it was there, still in his early twenties, that his instinct for institution-building first showed itself: he helped establish the town's branch of the Arya Samaj, the Hindu reform movement founded by Swami Dayanand Saraswati, and its first Dayanand Anglo-Vedic school. The DAV model — English-medium, nationalist in temper, built on Arya Samaj ideas of social reform — spread across Punjab over the following decades, and Lajpat Rai remained one of its most consistent patrons. He was, in the same period, closely associated with the founding and early management of the Punjab National Bank, registered in Lahore in 1894 as one of the first Indian-owned banks in the country; the bank's own later accounts have gone as far as to credit him as a founding father, though the more precise record names Dyal Singh Majithia, Lala Harkishen Lal and several others as the founders proper, with Lajpat Rai as an early and active hand in its administration.
Lal, Bal, Pal
By the first decade of the new century he had moved from institution-building into open confrontation with the colonial state. Alongside Bal Gangadhar Tilak of Maharashtra and Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal, he formed the "Lal-Bal-Pal" trio — three provincial leaders whose surnames gave the alliteration its name, and whose politics pulled the Indian National Congress away from the polite constitutionalism of its founding generation toward something closer to mass agitation. In 1907 the government deported him without trial to Mandalay, in Burma, for his role in organising Punjabi peasants against a punitive land-revenue settlement. He used the year in exile to write; released in 1908, he returned to a public standing that the deportation had, if anything, enlarged.
War stranded him a second time, on more comfortable terms. Travelling to the United States in 1914, he found himself unable to return once fighting began in Europe, and spent close to five years lecturing across America, founding the Indian Home Rule League of America in New York in 1917. It was a moderate, diaspora-facing project, distinct from — and considerably less confrontational than — the Ghadar movement that Punjabi immigrants on the American west coast had already built around the call for armed revolt; the two currents shared an audience and a grievance without ever quite sharing a method. He returned to India in 1920 and was elected president of the Congress that same year, at its special session in Calcutta, by which point the party's centre of gravity had shifted a good deal further toward the position he had been arguing for years earlier.
Simon, Go Back
The final chapter opened in 1928, with the arrival of the Simon Commission — a body appointed by the British Parliament to review India's constitutional future, and one that, notoriously, included not a single Indian member. Lajpat Rai, already unwell, led the campaign against it in Punjab, and on 30 October he headed a mass procession through Lahore to meet the Commission's train with black flags and the chant "Simon, go back." The police, under the district's Superintendent, James A. Scott, moved to break up the march with lathis — long wooden batons — and Scott personally struck Lajpat Rai across the chest. Witnesses described a deliberate, targeted assault rather than a crowd-control measure that happened to catch him in its path.
That evening, addressing a public meeting still bruised from the day's violence, he is remembered as having said that the blows struck at him would be "the last nails in the coffin of British rule in India" — the wording varies slightly between the accounts that recorded it, but its defiance does not.
A Death, and a Reckoning
He died seventeen days later, on 17 November 1928, in Lahore. What exactly killed him remains, honestly, a matter of dispute. Contemporary reports and most subsequent accounts describe a heart attack; nationalist opinion at the time, and a great deal of historical writing since, has treated that heart attack as the direct consequence of the beating, injuries compounding on a body already worn down by decades of prison, exile and overwork. A more cautious reading holds that the causal line cannot be drawn with certainty — that a man in his sixties with an existing heart condition might have died when he did regardless, and that the beating's role, real as it plainly was, is impossible to isolate from everything else. Both versions are argued in good faith. Neither can be settled from the historical record as it stands.
What is not in dispute is what happened next. Young radicals in Lahore, many of them associated with the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, resolved to avenge the death, and settled on Scott as the target. On 17 December 1928, Bhagat Singh and Shivaram Rajguru shot dead a police officer they believed to be Scott outside the district police headquarters. He was, in fact, John Saunders, a junior officer who happened to be leaving the building at the wrong moment — a case of mistaken identity that the revolutionaries themselves later acknowledged with something close to regret, even as they stood by the act's purpose. The killing set off the manhunt, the Assembly bombing eight months later, and the trial that ended with Bhagat Singh's execution in March 1931. Lajpat Rai did not ask for any of that to follow from his death. It followed anyway, which is as good a measure as any of how much weight his name still carried in the province he had spent forty years agitating on behalf of.