Saunders’ Murder (Lahore, December 1928)

Just when the HSRA revolutionaries had begun to move away from individual heroic action, the death of Sher-i-Punjab Lala Lajpat Rai due to lathi blows received during a lathi- charge on an anti-Simon Commission procession (October 1928) led them once again to take to individual assassination. Bhagat Singh, Azad and Rajguru shot dead Saunders, the police official responsible for the lathicharge in Lahore. The assassination was justified with these words: “The murder of a leader respected by millions of people at the unworthy hands of an ordinary police officer...was an insult to the nation. It was the bounden duty of young men of India to efface it... We regret to have had to kill a person but he was part and parcel of that inhuman and unjust order which has to be destroyed.”