Why a Pakistani lawyer wants a court to retry the case that led to Bhagat Singh’s execution

On March 6, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ruled that ousted prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been unjustly hanged in 1979. The court’s ruling was following a presidential reference filed 12 years ago.

It was a reminder of the execution of freedom fighter Bhagat Singh and his comrades nearly a century ago in 1931.

In 2013, my friends in Lahore, advocate Abdul Rasheed Qureshi and his son Imtiaz, both senior lawyers of the Lahore High Court, petitioned the court to reopen the Lahore Conspiracy case that led to the execution of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru.

Qureshi and Imtiaz had founded the Bhagat Singh Memorial Foundation in 2010 to take forward the memory of the revolutionary and freedom fighter born on Pakistani soil in Banga.

Qureshi passed away in 2021.

Imtiaz told Sapan News that the Lahore Conspiracy case did not fulfill the requirements of justice as due process had not been followed.

Bhagat Singh’s name was not even mentioned in the police report that was used as the basis of the case. It was also not brought before a trial court – which is also what happened with Bhutto.

The three-judge tribunal hearing the Lahore Conspiracy case pronounced the death sentence without hearing the testimonies of as many as 450 witnesses, or giving...

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