Bhagat Singh was born in 1907 at Banga in Lyallpur district, into a family already in the movement: his uncle Ajit Singh was deported the year he was born, his father Kishan Singh was repeatedly jailed. The family village in Punjab is Khatkar Kalan.
He left school after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, joined the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and then the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, and worked as a journalist under several names.
In December 1928 he and Rajguru shot the police officer John Saunders at Lahore, having intended Superintendent Scott, whose lathi charge had led to Lala Lajpat Rai's death. In April 1929 he and Batukeshwar Dutt threw two low-explosive bombs into the Central Legislative Assembly at Delhi and stayed to be arrested, in order to get a platform.
His writings from prison, particularly Why I am an Atheist, written in 1930 at twenty-three, are the reason he is more than a martyr. They argue against religion, against caste, against communalism and for a socialist republic, and they are a good deal harder to appropriate than his photograph.
He was hanged at Lahore on 23 March 1931 at twenty-three, with Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru.
He is used as a symbol by every political formation in Punjab, including several whose programmes he wrote against by name.
He was twenty-three when he was hanged, and the writing he left, including the prison notebook and the essay on why he was not a believer, is what the argument about him is actually about.
He was a socialist and an atheist who said so in print, and he is claimed by every political party in India, most of which disagree with everything he wrote.
He was from Khatkar Kalan in a family already in the movement. The Assembly bomb was thrown to be arrested, and the trial was the point of the act.