Madan Lal Dhingra’s Birth anniversary, the nation pays homage

New Delhi ( Raghwendra Pratap Singh) :

Madan Lal Dhingra was an Indian revolutionary freedom fighter. He was one of India’s earliest revolutionaries to sacrifice his life in the struggle against British rule, is a solemn reminder of a forgotten hero who challenged the empire at young age of 25. He was born on 18 September 1883 in Amritsar. Dhingra received his early education in Amritsar and later moved to England for further studies. He enrolled at University College, London, where he studied engineering.While in England, Dhingra became deeply involved in the activities of the Indian independence movement.He came in contact with the revolutionaries like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Shyamji Krishna Varma, the founder of Indian House, and several others.

Curzon Wyllie’s assassination:

On July 1, 1909, Madan Lal Dhingra assassinated Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, a retired British Indian Army officer and a prominent official, during a public meeting in London’s Imperial Institute.During the trial, he claimed that he had murdered Curzon-Wyllie as a patriotic act and in revenge for the inhumane killings of Indians by the British Government in India.

He was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged to death on August 17, 1909, at the age of only 24. He was disowned by his family for his anti-British leanings – so much so that even after his death his family refused to take his body.

On August 17, 1909, at exactly 9:00 AM, a 25-year-old engineering student from Amritsar walked to the gallows at London’s Pentonville Prison with unshakeable resolve. Madan Lal Dhingra, who had assassinated a senior British official six weeks earlier, became the first Indian freedom fighter to be executed on British soil. Yet today, over a century later, his name remains conspicuously absent from the pantheon of heroes celebrated. a deliberate erasure that reveals historical antipathy toward revolutionary nationalism and its systematic privileging of a sanitized narrative that diminishes Hindu nationalist contributions to India’s independence struggle.