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

On 8 April 1929 Batukeshwar Dutt and Bhagat Singh threw two harmless bombs in the Central Legislative Assembly and refused to run. Bhagat Singh was hanged within two years. Dutt got transportation for life, the Cellular Jail and its hunger strikes, release in 1938, jail again in 1942, and thirty years of working for a living in Patna. This lesson is about the cost of surviving.

The Gallery at Half Past Twelve

It is Monday, 8 April 1929, about half past twelve in the afternoon. The Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi is full. Vithalbhai Patel, the President of the House, has risen to give his ruling on the Trade Disputes Bill. Two young men are standing in the visitors' gallery above, looking down at the benches.

One of them is twenty-one years old. His name is Batukeshwar Dutt, and he was born in a village in the Bardhaman district of Bengal. He has a bomb in his hand.

The bombs go off seconds apart, on empty stretches of floor. Smoke fills the chamber. Members duck behind benches. Printed leaflets come drifting down from the gallery like a slow snowfall, and the two young men shout Inquilab Zindabad, long live the revolution.

Then comes the part that almost nobody copies. They do not run. The stairs behind them are clear. They stand where they are, in the smoke, and wait for the police to climb up and take them by the arms.

Both men had agreed on this before they came. Being caught was the plan, because the trial was the point. A courtroom is a place where you are allowed to speak. They had things to say that no newspaper would print. What neither of them could know is that one of them would be dead in twenty-three months, and the other would live for another thirty-six years.

This lesson is about the one who lived.

Why Two Bombs That Hurt Nobody

The two bills before the House that spring were the Public Safety Bill and the Trade Disputes Bill. The first would have let the government deport people it disliked without a trial. The second would have made most strikes illegal. Together they were a lock on both doors at once, the political one and the industrial one.