Martyrs’ Day
By Yashovardhan Sinha
Wo kaun thha, wo kahan ka thha, kya hua thha usey
Suna hai aaj koi shaqa mar gaya yaron…… (Sharyar)
When I was in junior school we were taught Subhadra kumara Chauhan’s famous poem- veeron ka kaisa ho vasant. Our teacher would have done well to also take us just 2 or 3 miles from our school to show us a humble house in Patna’s Jakkanpur area and to ask us to write an essay on Veeron ka kaisa na ho ant. For that house would have been where of one of the bravest heroes of our freedom struggle Batukeshwar Dutt was still living.
I was born and brought up in Patna. But discovered only recently that Batukeshwar Dutt had spent the last two decades of his life in my home-town. What shame on me! And once you discover his story you will realise what a shame it is on my city, my state and my country. On us ungrateful Indians.
Dutt was born on 18 November 1910 in a village near Burdwan in Bengal, His family shifted to Kanpur when he was in high school and there he met Chandrasekhar Azad. In those days Chandrashekhar Azad was running his revolutionary activities in the areas of Jhansi, Kanpur and Allahabad and Dutt too was fired with revolutionary zeal. Bhagat Singh also came to Kanpur in 1924. Seeing his passion and patriotism, Bhagat Singh started treating him as a friend from the very first meeting. When the Hindustan Socialist Republican, Association (HSRA) was formed under the leadership of Chandrashekhar Azad in 1928, Batukeshwar Dutt was a member of it along with Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru. Dutt took special training in making bombs. He was directly involved in many revolutionary activities of HSRA.
In 1929 when the British government decided to introduce some draconian acts to curb the activities of the revolutionaries, Bhagat Singh expressed his intention to explode a bomb n the Central Assembly in the same way as French revolutionaries had done in the Chamber of Deputies of France. Initially it was planned that Dutt and Rajguru would do the work out later Bhagat Singh replaced Rajguru and he and Batukeshwar Dutt went to the visitor’s gallery of the Assembly and Dutt somehow managed to smuggle in the low-intensity bombs.
In the book, ‘The Jail Notebook and Other Writings. Chaman Lal writes, “It was clear from the beginning that these bombs were to be harmless, not designed to kill or injure anyone, nit to create an explosion that would make the deaf hear… At the appointed time, Bhagat Singh and BK Dutta hurled the bombs over the empty seats in the Central Assembly, threw the historic pamphlets ‘To Make the Deaf Hear’ and shouted slogans: ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ and ‘Samrajyavaad ka naash ho’!
AIthough the two could have tried to escape in the pandemonium that ensued, they made no such attempt. They were arrested on the spot and readily confessed to their act. They mere tried and sentenced to transportation for life to the Cellular Jail at Andamans. Dutt’s sentence was executed but Bhagat Singh had the case of the killing of British officer John Saunders pending and was held back and was later convicted and executed. When Dutt learnt at Andamans of the execution of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, he was heart-broken as he felt left-out. He wanted to hang with his comrades, not survive as a prisoner for life.
At Andamans Dutt contracted TB and nearly lost his life. He was therefore shifted to Bankipore Jail, Patna in 1937 and released the next year when his condition got worse. However Batukeshwar Dutt survived and when Congress launched the Quit India movement he threw himself into it. He was again arrested and spent 4 more years in jail.
After India became independent, Batukeshwar Dutt married a girl named Anjali in November 1947 and started living in Patna.
By then the headlines of April 1929 had faded from public memory and Dutt had been all but forgotten. He became an agent of a cigarette company, going from shop to shop to pick up orders. Later he tried his hand at making biscuits but the venture failed. The Dutt household survived on the meagre earnings of Anjali who was a middle school teacher.
In the licence-permit raj of the 1950s, bus permits were being issued at Patna and preference was to be given to freedom fighters. Dutt was advised to apply. In this connection he lad to meet the District Magistrate. When he met the gentleman he was asked to produce evidence of his being a freedom fighter!
This story somehow reached the ears of President Rajendra Prasad and the DM tendered an apology to Dutt. But Batukeshwar Babu could not raise the money to buy a bus so ultimately nothing came of it.
Dutt was also made a member of the Bihar Legislative Council but due to some technical error, he could remain a member for just 4 months.
The Dutt family continued to struggle to survive. In 1964 Batukeshwar Dutt fell seriously ill and his family admitted him in the general ward of a government hospital.
Moved by his plight his friend Chamanlal Azad wrote a scathing piece in a newspaper lamenting that such a brave and self-sacrificing patriot should have been born in an ungrateful Nation like India.
This report was picked up by different newspapers and Punjab government was the first to offer help. Government of Bihar was then shamed into action and he was shifted to Delhi n November 1964.
At AIIMS cancer of an advanced stage was detected.
At Delhi, Bhagat Singh’s mother came to meet her son’s close associate and dear friend. Batukeshwar Babu told her that it was his wish that he too should be cremated near his friend’s samadhi.
Batukeshwar Dutt died on 20th July 1965 and he was cremated, as per his wishes, at Hussainiwala near the Indo-Pak border where his three friends – Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev had their samadhi.
When I gathered the story of the post – Independence life of this valiant son of India from the net, I was filled with anger against the governments of Bihar and India. But then I thought that if the citizens of Patna had no time for Batukeshwar Dutt, how could anyone expect the government of the same people to have acted better?
