My father, Dr. Prem Datta Varma, was a freedom fighter who spent five years in jail. A friend once asked me why, after such deep devotion to India, he chose to leave for another country. Many people migrate to the United States in search of improved opportunities and a more secure future for their families. My father’s reason was similar, though with some differences.

As a history professor at Punjab University in the 1960s, his goal was to research and write a thesis on student freedom fighters during British rule—a group he himself belonged to, made up mostly of college students from Lahore. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru, who were sentenced to death in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, were also college students there. My father, then a first-year student at DAV College, Lahore, witnessed these events firsthand.

In 1928, Arya Samaj leader Lala Lajpat Rai organized a protest in Lahore against British rule, which drew massive participation from college students. During the march, British officers Saunders and Scott attacked Lala Lajpat Rai, who was leading the procession,  with batons, inflicting injuries that ultimately led to his death. My father, along with many other students, saw this brutality. Deeply shaken, they resolved to avenge their beloved leader’s killing. After careful planning and secretly acquiring a gun, they assassinated Officer Saunders on December 17, 1928, at a police station. (Scott happened to be absent that day.)

The aim of these young revolutionaries was to mobilize students against the illegal British occupation of India. They were ordinary students with no prior experience in organizing political movements against a powerful empire. Sukhdev’s sister, an attorney and activist in Lahore, often visited DAV College’s hostel to inspire students. While Bhagat Singh and his comrades were hiding from the police, new members continued to join their cause. One of those new members was a couple from Calcutta. Mr. Mukherjee was a chemistry professor. He knew how to make a small bomb.

The group later decided to create a non-lethal bomb—designed only to make noise and attract attention, not to injure anyone. They chose the Lahore Assembly as their target. When the assembly was in session, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw the bombs, which contained nothing but confetti. No one was harmed. Instead, Singh and Dutt distributed pamphlets, raising slogans like “India Desires Freedom,” to explain their mission.

These actions directly challenge the claim that Bhagat Singh was a Marxist. Can anyone point to a Marxist movement in history that avoided bloodshed? Unlike Marxist revolutions, which caused countless deaths under leaders like Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, and Lenin, Bhagat Singh’s movement sought to awaken people to fight for freedom without indiscriminate violence. Even today, while communist parties are banned in the U.S., a Marxist political party operates openly in India, influencing campuses, labor unions, and farmers’ unions—the three most vulnerable groups to ideological exploitation. Students are often influenced by teachers with biases.

My father was both a history student and later a professor in India. His lifelong aspiration was to pursue doctoral research on the role of Indian college students in the freedom struggle against the British Empire. Having himself served five years in a British prison, he was not just a scholar of the movement but also one of its participants. At the young age of 17, he became a close associate of Bhagat Singh, one of the movement’s most prominent leaders. While Bhagat Singh was eventually executed, my father received a sentence of five years of rigorous imprisonment. This experience gave him a deep, firsthand understanding of the actions, motivations, and philosophy of the student-led resistance.

After his release, my father applied to Punjab University, Chandigarh, to pursue a PhD. On the university’s selection committee sat Khushwant Singh—already a well-known writer and affiliated with India’s Marxist party. Singh insisted that my father acknowledge and document Bhagat Singh as a Marxist in his thesis. The communist party, which had previously dismissed Bhagat Singh and his comrades as anarchists, was now eager to claim them as their own national heroes. My father refused, maintaining that Bhagat Singh had never expressed Marxist leanings.

It is worth noting that Khushwant Singh’s mother, Shobha Singh, had been the one to identify Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt following the Lahore Assembly bombing. While the young revolutionaries did read books by Karl Marx—many of them brought by Sukhdev’s sister, a lawyer and activist—they never accepted Marxist philosophy. They studied such works only as a means of learning how to organize a resistance movement.

This same sister played a significant role in supporting the group. She frequently visited the DAV College hostel, helped the students obtain books they could not afford, and continued to support them even after their arrests. She recovered the bodies of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru after their executions, and even arranged for my father to complete an FA degree through correspondence while in prison.

Upon his release, the British imposed strict conditions: he could not live in a major city or associate with freedom fighters. For five years he lived in the remote village of Mohala, J&K, continuing his studies by correspondence and working toward a bachelor’s degree in history. Some courses, however, required in-person attendance, so in 1940 he petitioned the British government to allow him to move to Lahore to complete his degree at DAV College. The government agreed—not out of goodwill, but pragmatism. Constant surveillance of my father in Mohala was expensive; allowing him to study in Lahore reduced the cost of monitoring him. Two policemen were still assigned to watch him, but this was far less of a burden to the colonial administration.

Although denied the chance to pursue doctoral studies in India, my father never abandoned his dream. Years later, after migrating to the United States, he finally earned his PhD in history from the University of Cincinnati—at the remarkable age of 74.