‘Every Tiny Molecule of Ash’

On a muggy morning in late July, when tens of thousands of protesters thronged to central New Delhi to head toward parliament, they seemed to already have a sense that their march might be historic. Most were students and young graduates, many of whom had traveled from towns hundreds of miles away to attend their very first protest. As I squeezed through the crowd I saw posters with cartoons of a bespectacled, mustached man accompanied by varied fonts spelling the word RESIGN—a reference to the rally’s central demand that India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, step down after presiding over a disastrous exam-paper leak. But nearly as common were portraits of revolutionaries from the Indian independence struggle: M.K. Gandhi, the Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar, and, most ubiquitous that day, Bhagat Singh.Born in 1907 in Banga (in present-day Pakistan), Singh became an anticolonial militant in 1928, when the seven-member Indian Statutory Commission—popularly known as the “Simon Commission” after its chief, John Simon—arrived in India to assess conditions for constitutional reforms. As it moved from city to city across the colony, the commission, which had no Indian members, was ...