Prologue continues....

Bhagat Singh represented the conscience of a rebellious young India. His martyrdom shook the nation. He and his associates made the supreme sacrifice for the liberation of the motherland. These are men who rarely come into this world and who after performing their historical mission depart in glory. Violence against the colonial rulers was a spontaneous expression of anger.

However, Gandhi wanted to rid the mind of all kinds of violence and take non-violence to a higher, metaphysical plane. Ahimsa for him was not a mere renouncement of violence in action. It was much greater

than that. It was akin to a deep spiritual experience for Gandhi. He writes

about ahimsa in his book My Experiments with Truth:

“However sincere my strivings after Ahimsa may have been, they

have still been imperfect and inadequate.

The little fleeting glimpses, therefore, that I have been able to have of Truth can hardly convey an idea of the indescribable lustre of Truth, a million times more intense than that of the Sun we daily see with our eyes.

In fact what I have caught is only the faintest glimmer of that mighty effulgence. But this much I can say with assurance, as a result of all my experiments, that a perfect vision of Truth can only follow a complete realisation of Ahimsa.”

The freedom movement he led was an experiment in ahimsa – an

absolutely novel experiment in the history of mass movements. It shook

the foundations of colonial rule in India. Gandhi unleashed the moral

force of this ancient civilization and confronted the mighty British empire.

People went to the gallows with their spirit unbroken. Severe repression

could not break their will. Non-violent resistance by an oppressed people

created the toughest moral crisis for the imperialists, whose guns became

a symbol of their moral defeat. The mightiest empire in human history

had to pack up and leave.

Thus, finally India woke up from the long night of subjugation into

the dawn of freedom on 15 August 1947. On this historic occasion, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru said with a touch of poetry:

To be continued...