Chandigarh: On Saturday, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) workers and volunteers in Punjab were asked by their respective district units to wear yellow turbans — as tribute to freedom fighter Bhagat Singh — while attending the 16 March swearing-in ceremony of CM-designate Bhagwant Mann.
This is the third such message issued to the party cadre by AAP’s top rung since 10 March — when it won the Punjab assembly polls with a thumping majority of 92 out of 117 seats.
The first two messages had come from Mann himself. The Sangrur MP declared that government offices under the AAP’s leadership can only carry photographs of Bhagat Singh and BR Ambedkar, Independent India’s first law minister, as opposed to those of the chief minister. The second was that he would take oath as CM in Bhagat Singh’s village Khatkar Kalan, and not at Raj Bhawan in Chandigarh.
Mann himself sports a yellow turban in public appearances, which he has often attributed to his reverence for Bhagat Singh.
While there is doubt among historians about whether Bhagat Singh had a preference for the Basanti pagdi (yellow turban), there are no ambiguities when it comes to the AAP’s attempts to fit the Bhagat Singh legacy at the centre of its politics at a time when the party, buoyed by its victory in Punjab, is looking to expand its footprint in the arena of national politics.
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From Gandhi to Bhagat Singh
A senior leader of the AAP, who did not wish to be identified, told ThePrint: “If you recall the early days of the AAP, it was always more about Mahatma Gandhi than Bhagat Singh.”
The AAP sprouted from the ‘India Against Corruption’ movement led by social activist Anna Hazare in 2011 — which was driven more by a Gandhian idea than anything else. The Gandhian imprint on AAP’s politics was such that even Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Rajmohan Gandhi joined the party in 2014.
“The idea of Bhagat Singh started making space in AAP’s politics when they started engaging a large number of young volunteers in Punjab in 2014,” a senior functionary told ThePrint.
In 2014, AAP leaders who contested the Lok Sabha polls — such as Bhagwant Mann and Gul Panag in Punjab, and Rakhi Birla in Delhi — started their campaigns by paying tribute to Bhagat Singh. After Mann won the Sangrur Lok Sabha seat that year, he went to Bhagat Singh’s memorial in Khatkar Kalan, and placed his certificate at the feet of a statue of the freedom fighter.
At the time, Bhagat Singh was yet to take up a prominent space in AAP’s politics, the functionary added.
“As the number of young volunteers grew, the idea of embracing Bhagat Singh’s legacy and making it part of the party’s core politics became larger. It took some time. In the 2017 assembly election campaign too, the party’s local leadership in Punjab projected AAP as a party driven by Bhagat Singh’s ideas and it worked well in terms of mass appeal, even though the party did not win the polls because of several other factors,” said another senior AAP functionary.
The functionary further said that the AAP needed a legacy different from that of its opponents.
“After coming to power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi put Gandhi at the centre of his governance and executive policies — starting with the ‘Swachh Bharat’ mission. The AAP definitely needed a different legacy. Embracing Bhagat Singh had an advantage. Unlike Gandhi, who also has haters in certain political sections affiliated to the right wing, Bhagat Singh is respected both by the Right and the Left. Bhagat Singh is respected across the nation and his legacy does not polarise voters,” he added.
The success of the strategy seems to have given adequate confidence to Mann, who had in a press conference ahead of elections appealed to people to think about the sacrifices of freedom fighters such as Bhagat Singh when they go to cast their votes.
‘Now that we are expanding, we take inspiration from him’
In conversations with ThePrint, AAP workers, district-level office bearers and several MLAs in Punjab admitted that having Bhagat Singh at the core of their poll campaign yielded electoral dividends, but refrained from commenting on larger political strategies of the AAP involving the freedom fighter’s legacy as they expand beyond Punjab.
However, Kailash Gahlot, senior AAP leader and a minister in the Delhi cabinet, told ThePrint that the party does take inspiration from Bhagat Singh in pursuing its ambition to expand across the country.
“We have always maintained that AAP is not just a party but a revolution. The revolution started in Delhi and now it is spreading across the country. Shaheed Bhagat Singh is the biggest revolutionary that this country has seen and people across the nation respect him. We are a party of common people which works for common people…Now that we are expanding across the country, we take inspiration from him,” he said.
Embracing Bhagat Singh in Indian politics is not new. In 2008, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) demand for a Bharat Ratna for former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee found little favour with its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which suggested that “Bhagat Singh or the Indian soldier” deserved the country’s highest civilian honour.
Every year, from PM Modi to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, nobody misses paying tribute to Bhagat Singh on his birth and death anniversaries.
The AAP, however, has attempted to go one step ahead in the race.
In its last budget tabled on 9 March, 2021, the AAP government in Delhi set aside Rs 45 crore for initiatives related to patriotism, with Rs 10 crore each reserved specifically for programmes to depict the lives of Bhagat Singh and Ambedkar. Later in the year, the government launched a Deshbhakti (patriotism) curriculum for schools on the freedom fighter’s birth anniversary.
Ahead of the Punjab polls, when both Congress and BJP had targeted Kejriwal over allegations of him being a separatist-sympathiser, the AAP in its defense compared Kejriwal’s case with that of Bhagat Singh, citing how the freedom fighter was branded as a terrorist by the British.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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