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Plate 07 — The Assembly
Eight minutes that defined a life
On 8 April 1929 two members of the HSRA interrupted a legislature they regarded as powerless, in order to be arrested by it. This is what happened, in seven chapters — and what this site will not describe.
This page describes a historical event involving explosives. It contains no information about the construction, acquisition or use of any device, and it does not present the event as an adventure, a spectacle or a game. It is set out as political history, which is how the people involved asked for it to be understood.
The political climate
In the spring of 1929 the Indian political situation was unusually tense, and the tension came from several directions at once.
The Simon Commission had been touring India since 1928 to review the country’s constitutional future, with no Indian among its members. It had been met by protest and black flags in every major city. In Lahore in October 1928, a demonstration against the Commission was broken up by police; Lala Lajpat Rai, one of the most prominent nationalist leaders in Punjab, was injured in the course of it and died some weeks later. His death became a rallying point for the revolutionary current in northern India.
At the same time the industrial labour movement was expanding and increasingly confident, and the colonial state was increasingly inclined to treat it as a security problem. In March 1929 a large group of trade unionists and communists had been arrested in what became the Meerut Conspiracy Case, a prosecution that would run for years.
Into this the government brought two bills.
Colonial legislation and opposition
The Public Safety Bill was directed at individuals the government regarded as subversive, and was widely understood as a mechanism for removing or restricting political organisers — including foreign communists working in India — without ordinary judicial process. The Trade Disputes Bill restricted strike action, particularly in essential services and public utilities, and prohibited strikes undertaken for political rather than industrial purposes.
Both were strongly opposed in the Central Legislative Assembly. And here the structural problem became visible: even where the Assembly could muster the votes to reject a measure, the Viceroy retained the authority to certify it into law. The chamber could refuse and be overruled.
For the HSRA, this was not an argument about two particular bills. It was evidence about the nature of the institution itself — a legislature that could deliberate but could not decide, offered to Indians as representation.
The target was not a bill. It was the demonstration that refusing a bill made no difference.
The revolutionary response
The HSRA decided on an action inside the Assembly itself. The design had an unusual requirement: it had to be dramatic enough to command national attention, and it had to avoid killing anyone.
Those two requirements shaped every element of what followed. The devices used were of low intensity. They were thrown towards a part of the chamber deliberately chosen because it was unoccupied. Printed leaflets were prepared for distribution at the moment of the action, so that the political argument would be in the room and in the newspapers rather than left to inference. And the participants were to remain and be arrested.
That last element is the one that most clearly distinguishes this action from an attack. An escape plan is the normal centre of clandestine operational design. Here its deliberate absence was the mechanism: arrest produced a trial, a trial produced reporting, and reporting produced the audience the leaflets had been written for.
Batukeshwar Dutt and Bhagat Singh were selected to carry it out.
8 April 1929
On the afternoon of Monday 8 April 1929, the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi was sitting. The President of the Assembly, Vithalbhai Patel, was giving his ruling on the Public Safety Bill.
Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt were in the Visitors’ Gallery. Two bombs were thrown down into the chamber, towards benches that had been chosen because nobody was sitting in them. Red leaflets were scattered from the gallery. Both men shouted Inquilab Zindabad — “Long live the revolution” — and, by contemporary accounts, slogans against imperialism.
A small number of people in the chamber received minor injuries. No one was killed.
The leaflet was issued in the name of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association and signed “Balraj”. Its argument was that a government which would not listen to Indian opinion had to be addressed in a language loud enough to register — a formulation drawn from a line associated with the French anarchist Auguste Vaillant, that it takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear. It also invoked the death of Lala Lajpat Rai.
Neither man attempted to leave the gallery. They were arrested there.
“When Mr Patel from India got up to give his ruling on the Public Safety Bill, two bombs were thrown from a gallery near the seat of George Schuster.”
— The Tribune, contemporary report
George Schuster was the Finance Member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. The detail matters only as a description of where in the chamber the bombs fell.
Arrest
The arrests were immediate and uncontested, because they had been the intention. This is the single most misunderstood element of the episode, and the one that most clearly separates it from the category of attack.
Everything else in the design followed from it. If the object had been to kill, the choice of an empty target area makes no sense. If the object had been to escape, the distribution of signed political leaflets identifying the responsible organisation makes no sense. If the object had been simple destruction, low-intensity devices make no sense. Each element is coherent only on the assumption that the participants intended to be taken into custody and to argue their case in public afterwards.
Trial
The prosecution had a straightforward task on the facts, since the accused did not dispute what they had done. The contest was over meaning. Section 307 of the Indian Penal Code concerns attempt to murder, and the defence argument turned on intent: that the object had been to make a political statement and not to cause death, with the empty target area, the low charge and the refusal to escape offered as the evidence.
The court convicted both men and sentenced them to transportation for life on 12 June 1929. Batukeshwar Dutt was eighteen years old.
But the trial had done what the action was designed to make it do. Proceedings were reported. The leaflet’s arguments, and the defendants’ statements about their purpose, reached a national readership that no HSRA pamphlet could have reached on its own. A prosecution intended to dispose of a case had instead given it a national platform.
The event in public memory
For Bhagat Singh, the Assembly action was the beginning of two years of intense public visibility that ended at the gallows and made him one of the defining figures of modern Indian memory. For Batukeshwar Dutt, it became the single fact that any account of him would lead with for the rest of his life and long after it.
Popular retellings have tended to compress the episode. The bombs become larger than they were, the intention becomes more violent than the evidence supports, and the trial — which was the entire object — is treated as an epilogue rather than as the destination. The leaflets are frequently omitted altogether, although without them the action is close to unintelligible.
What is most often lost is the arithmetic of the aftermath. The event occupied a few minutes of one afternoon. Dutt spent roughly the next nine years in colonial prisons as a direct consequence, and the remaining twenty-seven years of his life living with what those prisons had done to his health and his prospects.