Operation Trojan Horse- The British Authority of India was frustrated with the rising popularity of Bhagat Singh and his ways of exploiting the Government machinery — the courts and Press Newspapers for propagating his ideology. And when on 8th March 1931, Bhagat Singh gave his consent to Bejoy Kumar Sinha to file a mercy petition to the crown on his behalf after a prolong discussion between two friends, the same racial group of some English officers felt that their ambitions could not be fulfilled. So they made a secret plan according to which they send a team of some officers to Delhi and put up the pressure on Lord Irwin and thus getting his silent consent to carry on their plan named “Trojan Horse”. So, on 23rd March, 1931, the “Trojan Horse” plan was fully implemented and after a fake drama of execution the three young men were brought unconscious to a secret place in the Lahore Cantonment where they were shot dead by “the death squad”. To conceal the whole episode, the authorities had made arrangement for cremation at some secret place on the right bank of the Beas and the Sutlej convergence. On the other hand to divert the public attention, the authorities had made arrangement for another pyre at Hussainiwala. They were also afraid of postmortem which would reveal the presence of bullets in the dead bodies and the same was the case with the ashes. By doing so, the Englishmen had fulfilled two jobs. One, to pacify the anger of the relatives of Saunders and on other hand they hoped to befool Indians who would pay tributes at the wrong place and would worship the wrong bodies remains. According to Allahabadi — as recalled by Kulwant and presented by Sindhra — the ‘execution’ of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev marked the execution of a conspiracy code-named “Operation Trojan Horse”, which, in effect, facilitated the pacification of the British officers in general and the prospective in-laws of the late J P Saunders in particular. Accordingly, Bhagat Singh and his associates did go through the formality of ‘hanging’ but only to the extent of breaking their necks; semi-conscious, they were taken to the Lahore Cantonment where the ‘Death Squad’, comprising Saunder’s family, shot them to quench their thirst for revenge. Since doing all this during day time could have invited a violent reaction from the people, the ‘execution’ was performed at night; for the same reason, the bullet-ridden bodies were neither sent for postmortem nor handed over to the relatives. Instead, most surreptitiously, these were taken in a lorry to a pre-fixed isolated place on a kutcha-road (6 miles away from Lahore, on the right bank of the Beas where it meets the Sutlej) and burnt to ashes. And, to put the people on the wrong track, some flesh and bones were half burnt and buried on the western bank of the Sutlej, near Hussainiwala. Two Indian agents were sent to Lahore to pose as volunteers and tell the Congress people that they had seen at Ganda Singh Wala a big burning pyre from a distance. Believing the story, some people (including Bhagat’s sister Bibi Amar Kaur) reached the ‘hot’ spot, dug up the flesh and half-burnt bones (plus one big broken but uncharred bone which they surmised must have been the arm of Bhagat Singh, the tallest of the three) that lay buried there, and took these back to Lahore where the half-burnt stuff was ‘properly’ cremated on the bank of the Ravi in the midst of sloganeering crowds, all in tears. This was precisely what the ‘Operation Trojan Horse’ meant to achieve — the British way of denying the martyrs the honour of a glorious farewell by the people. The real focus of the book is on the ‘hidden facts’ pertaining to the execution of Bhagat Singh. Indeed, the book is an attempt to provide new answers to the innumerable unresolved puzzles — e.g., why the unprecedented hanging of the three martyrs at night; why the dead bodies were not handed over to the relatives but cremated post-haste by the administration without the mandatory postmortem; above all, what was the place and nature of the ‘cremation’? tribuneindia/2005/20051211/spectrum/main1.htm
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 06:22:21 +0000
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