Azad's HSRA
The Kakori survivors and the Lahore students met in the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla in September 1928 and added one word to the party's name: Socialist. Bhagat Singh is the face of what followed and has his own shelf of books. This chapter is about the seven people around him: the commander, the organiser, the shooter, the partner, the hunger striker, the woman who carried them, and the philosopher who died on the Ravi.
Lessons in this chapter
- One Word Added at Feroz Shah Kotla — The night the HRA became the HSRA, and the seven people standing outside the famous photograph
- The Letter to Gandhi — The one letter in which Sukhdev Thapar speaks for himself, printed a month after he was hanged
- The First Shot — Shivaram Rajguru, the Sanskrit student who was the HSRA's best shot
- The Man Who Stayed in the Gallery — Batukeshwar Dutt threw the bomb, waited to be arrested, and then had to live with what came after
- Sixty-Three Days — Jatindra Nath Das, the chemist who starved for one word, and the funeral train that answered him
- The Platform at Lahore — Durgawati Devi Vohra, who carried the party and asked for her full share
- The Philosophy of the Bomb — Bhagwati Charan Vohra, who answered Gandhi in print and died on the Ravi
- Alfred Park — Chandrashekhar Azad, the commander the police never caught, and the twenty minutes that closed the line