He passed his matriculation examination from the local D.A.V. High School and left for abroad, first travelling to China and then onwards to America. In 1914, he returned home from America fired with revolutionary fervour. He established a school and a panchayat in his village and undertook a tour of the district distributing Ghadr literature among the people and exhorting them to join in the rising to expel the British from India and engage in sabotage, tampering with railway lines and cutting telephone wires.
“Although it is too hot in America, it’s too cold in India,” wrote Banta Singh of Sanghwal village to his peers at the Hindi Association of Pacific Coast in America. Banta Singh along with his four compatriots was sent by the Ghadar Party to India to prepare a fertile ground in terms of masses, weapons and other material for armed insurrection on the lines of the 1857 mutiny.
“Known as ‘the terror for Punjab Police’, Banta Singh along with six other Ghadarites from Jalandhar, kissed the gallows at an age when youths dream of marriage and career.
According to his granddaughter Dr Jasbir Kaur Gill, on seeing the lackadaisical approach of the Indians towards British atrocities, Singh built a strong revolutionary centre at his village, Sanghwal, known as the headquarter for Doaba region which was frequently visited by great revolutionaries like Ras Behari Bose, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Harnam Singh Tundilat, Bibi Gulab Kaur, Baba Sahib Singh and Bhan Singh Sialkot.
“He was a revolutionary since childhood. He believed that money lending was an act of exploitation of poor people and so he destroyed the ledgers of his father that contained the accounts of money given to indebted farmers and thus he had set them free from the clutches of all burdens,” said Dr Gill.
The famous fountainhead of Ghadar movement, Baba Bhagat Singh Bilga, had narrated countless efforts of Banta Singh in stirring the conscience of villagers by creating a panchayat, a library, a veterinary hospital and an autonomous justice delivery system to augment a parallel administrative set-up to reduce the dependence on British structures and to deliver justice quickly to the general masses.
The centre set up by Banta Singh proved to be the backbone of the Ghadar movement in Punjab. The British judicial system geared up to perpetuate the brutal regime of imperialists. It convicted Banta Singh in British army informer Chanda Singh’s murder case and in the murder of two British policemen at Wallah Railway Bridge in Amritsar.
According to Dr Gill, he joyfully kissed the gallows on August 12, 1915. It was his relative Buta Singh (brother in-law) who had informed the Punjab police about his whereabouts to get Rs 5,000 and two ‘murrabas of land’ at Jaura village in Hoshiarpur district. Banta Singh’s followers picked up Buta Singh and his five-year-old son and after killing them buried their body in the land awarded by the British government for his treachery.
Make a sustainable impact on global poverty by supporting grassroots social entrepreneurs. Hear back from the people you've supported and know what your donation achieved.
