‘End of a glorious chapter’: A journalist’s first-person account of Bhagat Singh’s execution

23 March 1931: [Journalist] Virendra was at Lahore’s Central Jail, detained under the stringent Regulation III of 1818. The air in the prison and on the streets was loaded with a sense of unease – the die had been cast. It was the morning that the three fearless revolutionaries were to meet their end. “The day Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev were hanged it was my fortune or misfortune to be in the same jail,” says Virendra, in his historic first-person account.

After their appeal was rejected by the Privy Council and especially after Bhagat Singh refused to petition for mercy, we knew it was only a matter of time … There was this barber who used to go to shave Rajguru and Sukhdev and come to us also. [Bhagat Singh by then had started growing his hair again.] We got all our information through him, and he came on 20 March and told us that the end seemed near. He felt that the jail authorities were preparing for such an eventuality …

In front of where we were lodged, there was an open ground. The jail authorities had started collecting wood there. We thought that after the hanging the three would be...

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