Eighty-six years after Udham Singh walked calmly to the gallows in London rather than betray the vow he had carried for two decades, his name still echoes through Indian political memory — and BJP MP Anurag Thakur marked the occasion on 31 July 2026 with a salute to the revolutionary's sacrifice.

Thakur, the Lok Sabha MP from Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh and former Union Minister, posted in Hindi: 'Bhartiya swatantrata sangram ke agrani krantikari, Jallianwala Bagh narsanhar ka pratishodh lene wale amar shaheed Udham Singh ji ke balidan diwas par karbaddh naman' — 'Reverential salute, hands folded, to immortal martyr Udham Singh — a pioneering revolutionary of India's freedom struggle and the man who avenged the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.'

The vow made in Amritsar, kept in London

The story behind the tribute is one of the most dramatic arcs in India's independence history. On 13 April 1919, British troops under General Reginald Dyer opened fire on unarmed civilians gathered at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing hundreds in minutes. Among those present that day was a young Udham Singh, who survived and reportedly swore revenge.

He waited twenty-one years. On 13 March 1940, at Caxton Hall in London, he shot and killed Michael O'Dwyer — the former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab who had approved Dyer's action — at a public meeting. He made no attempt to flee. Tried and convicted, Udham Singh was hanged at Pentonville Prison on 31 July 1940.

Revolutionary martyrs and the BJP's commemorative tradition

Thakur's post is part of a consistent pattern within the BJP of foregrounding armed revolutionaries — Udham Singh, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru — alongside the Gandhian mainstream of the freedom movement. These tributes, posted on martyrdom and birth anniversaries, reflect a deliberate effort to broaden the nationalist canon beyond non-violent struggle.

Since independence, national commemorations of revolutionary martyrs have been woven into civic life through state honours, school curricula, and parliamentary references — though the armed revolutionary tradition has historically received less institutional spotlight than the non-cooperation movement. Posts like Thakur's keep that counter-narrative visible in the public square.

Udham Singh's remains were repatriated to India in 1974, and he was cremated with full state honours in his native Sunam, Punjab. He is officially recognised as a martyr of the Indian independence movement.

On the 86th anniversary of his execution, the salute from Hamirpur to London — across eight decades and an ocean — is a reminder that some debts a nation considers permanently unpaid.