Even Che Guevara (1928-1967) lived till he was 39. Bhagat Singh (1907-1931) did not get the chance; the British Raj executed him when he was just 23. Most people in their early twenties have just begun to breathe by themselves, to learn what they are capable of and to test out this new, exciting knowledge.
Bhagat Singh's life was precocious. He grew up fast, and matured both socially and politically in the midst of a whirlwind time in the Indian freedom struggle. Not a month after he was born (a century ago this year), some Indian nationalists tried to blow up the viceroy's carriage in Midnapore. But Lord Minto survived, reluctantly pressured to bring some reform to the country's authoritarian political system (he must have longed for Canada, where as governor-general he had spent his spare time ice skating). When just eight, Bhagat Singh was moved by the execution of the accused in the first Lahore Conspiracy Case (1915-17), where the British went after the Ghadar Party radicals. One of those put to death was Kartar Singh Sarabha, whose sacrifice became the guiding star of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, founded in 1926. Bhagat Singh was 12 at the time of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar; thereafter, he kept a vial of its soil on his person at all times.
In such turbulent times, it was normal for young people to be drawn into the myriad struggles against British rule. Bhagat Singh's contemporaries were his equals: Ashfaqulla Khan (born in 1900), Chandrasekhar Azad (1906), Sukhdev Thapar (1907), Shivaram Rajguru (1909), Pritilata Waddedar (1911), Bina Das (1911), Kalpana Dutt (1914) and countless others. But there is something that makes Bhagat Singh rise above these others in our estimation. His image is iconic. Perhaps this is because he was not just one who acted, but one who acted and wrote, who studied, whose prose was the equal of his practice.
Everyone claims Bhagat Singh. Anand Patwardhan's gentle documentary In Memory of Friends (1990) makes this very clear. During the late 1980s, Patwardhan took his camera across Punjab, and found that the Congress, the Khalistani Sikh Students' Federation and the communists all wanted to celebrate Bhagat Singh's birth anniversary, and to draw him in as the precursor to their own struggles. Patwardhan's sympathies are plainly with the left; the degeneracy of the Congress weakens their claim to Bhagat Singh's legacy, while the Sikh Students' Federation has had a hard time with his famous 1931 essay, "Why I am an Atheist". Since Patwardhan made his film, the Hindutva movement too laid claim to Bhagat Singh, and Bollywood has gone along. There is an overdone scene in Dharmendra's 2002 film 23rd March 1931: Shaheed in which Bhagat Singh is blessed before an enormous map and Mother India figure. The iconography is entirely out of the playbook of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and it evokes the kind of 'mental stagnation' that Bhagat Singh derided before he died.