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| - Fact check: This is not Bhagat Singh getting flogged in the viral image
The man seen in the picture getting flogged was not freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. This picture was taken at Kasur railway station (now in Pakistan) around 1919. Singh was only 12 then and was studying at D.A.V school in Lahore.
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India Today Fact Check
The man seen in the picture getting flogged was not freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. This picture was taken at Kasur railway station (now in Pakistan) around 1919. Singh was only 12 then and was studying at D.A.V school in Lahore. Bhagat Singh did not participate in the freedom movement before 1920.
Ahead of India's 74th Independence Day, a message with a black and white image is being circulated on social media showing a man being flogged by another one in uniform claiming that this was freedom fighter, Bhagat Singh.
This message doing rounds on WhatsApp and Facebook also has an image of a newspaper clip with the same photo of flogging at the corner of the post. The Hindi caption of the Facebook post reads “This is a rare photo of Bhagat Singh ji where he is seen getting flogged. And we are taught that Nehru and Gandhi had given us freedom.”
India Today Anti Fake News War room (AFWA) found this to be a misleading claim. The man seen in the picture getting flogged is not freedom fighter, Bhagat Singh. This picture was taken at Kasur railway station (now in Pakistan) around 1919. Singh was only 12 then and was studying at D.A.V school in Lahore. Bhagat Singh did not participate in the freedom movement and was not arrested by the British before 1920.
The archived version of the post is saved here
With the help of the reverse image search, we found a tweet posted by Kim A. Wagner in 2018. According to the Twitter bio, he is the professor of Global and imperial history at the Queen Mary University of London.
The user posted the viral image along with another image and wrote: “Here are two of the photographs of public floggings at Kasur, in Punjab, that were smuggled out of India and published by Benjamin Horniman in 1920 #AmritsarMassacre."
We found the archive version of Benjamin Horniman’s book named ‘Amritsar and our duty to India’. On the 120th page, this viral photo appears with a caption, “Another picture of an India tied to a ladder at Kasur railway station being flogged”. Bhagat Singh’s name is not mentioned here.
We found the same image published in an article on a website called “Sab Rang” in 2019 on the occasion of 100 years of completion of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
The article gave details of the documents and pictures of British era repression and torture kept in the records of the National archives and now open to the public.
The viral image also appears in the article with a caption that read “Flogging in the erstwhile Punjab, 1919”.
According to the book, “The jail notebook and other writings” by Bhagat Singh and annotated by Bhupender Hooja, in 1919 Bhagat Singh was only 12 and was studying in D.A.V school in Lahore.
In April 1919, only days after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre that killed thousands of unarmed Indians by the British force, Bhagat Singh visited the place. There is no information about him being flogged or arrested by British soldiers in 1919 in the book.
According to the book “Dictionary of Martyrs. India’s freedom struggle (1857-1947)” released by the central government, Bhagat Singh actively participated in the freedom movement from the year 1920.
Though we cannot ascertain the identity of the man who was seen getting flogged in the viral picture but it can be said that as per the historical evidence, it is certain that the man in the viral picture was not Bhagat Singh.
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