Bhagat Singh: Between revolution and wisdom

Bhagat Singh: Between revolution and wisdom

I closed the pages of Why I Am An Atheist and Other Works on a quiet day in Chandigarh (29/10/2025). The book sat before me like an incomplete conversation; one I felt compelled to continue in the stillness of my own thoughts. As a man born in Baghdad in 1995, as someone whose childhood was painted in the ash-grey of conflict and whose adolescence was marked by losses both personal and national, I found myself drawn to this collection precisely because I needed to understand how a young man could question everything, even the divine.

Bhagat Singh was twenty-three when they hanged. I was twenty-three when I left Iraq, carrying nothing but documents and the weight of things I had witnessed. Perhaps this is why his words struck me with such force and such ambivalence.

The essay "Why I Am An Atheist" is brilliant in its audacity. There is no denying this. A young revolutionary, imprisoned, facing execution, takes his pen and writes with clarity about the absence of God in a land steeped in faith. The logic is sharp. The questions are piercing. But as I read his arguments, his questioning of divine justice, his dissection of religious hypocrisy, his embrace of Marxist materialism, I found myself thinking not of my own doubts, but of something else entirely.

I have seen what happens when young men become too sure, too quickly. Not just revolutionaries with bombs, but true believers of every stripe, those who possess the dangerous conviction that they alone understand how the world should be ordered. Bhagat Singh possessed this certainty. It is what made him brave. It is also what made him incomplete.

The book reveals something the author himself perhaps did not fully grasp: his journey toward atheism accelerated dramatically after his brother's death. Seven years of intellectual development compressed into radical crystallization. I understand grief-driven conviction more deeply than most. I have lost people I loved to violence that seemed to serve no purpose, to make no sense through any theological framework I had been taught. The natural human response is to reject the framework itself. But I have learned, through decades of watching others and myself, that dismissing the framework in a moment of pain is not the same as achieving wisdom about it.

Bhagat Singh's letters to his comrade's glow with authentic passion. His calls for justice are noble. His willingness to sacrifice everything for his principle's commands respect, even from those of us who question some of those principles. This is what troubles me most about this book. It contains absolute brilliance alongside fundamental incompleteness. A young man who had not yet learned what age teaches all of us: that certainty itself can be a kind of tyranny.

Would he have been a better revolutionist at thirty-five? Perhaps. Would his atheism have deepened or transformed? We will never know. This unknowing is the tragedy of his premature death, not merely that he died, but that he died before he could become fully himself.

As someone who has watched religious fervor and irreligious certainty both destroy and inspire, I do not think Bhagat Singh needed the respect he received despite his questioning of faith. I think he needed time. He needed to face the particular sorrows and joys that only mature life brings. He needed to encounter the complexity that cannot be resolved through dialectical materialism or revolutionary action alone.

And yet, crucially, I also believe this book should be read widely. Not because Bhagat Singh was entirely correct, but because he represents something vital: the right of a young person to question, to rage, to demand answers from the universe and from God. In a world where young people are often expected to inherit their parents' certainties without examination, his fierce interrogation is a gift. It is an invitation to think.

There are many shaheed like him, many martyrs whose names are known and unknown. Some died in my own country, in causes I understood and causes I did not. What distinguishes Bhagat Singh is not that his doubts were correct or his revolutionary philosophy sound. What distinguishes him is that he lived his questions fully, without compromise, even unto death.

This book is flawed because Bhagat Singh himself was flawed, a brilliant young man caught in the architecture of his own convictions, before time could teach him nuance. But it is also valuable because it preserves the voice of someone brave enough to question everything, to reject easy answers, and to choose his conscience over his comfort.

I recommend it. Not as a guide to belief or unbelief. Not as a blueprint for revolution. But as a window into the mind of someone who refused to be small or silent, even when silence would have saved him. In our current age, when so many accept received wisdom without interrogation, there is something to be learned from his refusal.

Still, I think he would have been better with time. And I think that is the most profound tragedy of his story, not that he questioned God, but that he never got to ask his questioning. That maturity was denied to him. That the old man's hard-won doubt never tempered the young man's certainties.

This is what I carry away from these pages: respect for the courage, caution about the certainty, and sorrow for the unlived years.