There are names in history that textbooks often reduce to a paragraph, but whose very lives were blazing torches that could have set the pages of our national consciousness on fire. Khudiram Bose is one such name. August 11 marks the death anniversary of this Bengali revolutionary, who was barely 18 when the British hung him, but already old in resolve, fierce in convictions, and immortal in courage.

In an age where revolutions are often measured in hashtags and trending videos, it is worth pausing to remember a boy who walked to the gallows with a smile, leaving behind a stunned British administration and a nation trembling with grief and newfound fire.

Khudiram’s association with Jugantar, a secret revolutionary group, places him firmly in an era of the Indian freedom movement unlike any other. It was an era where Hindutva, cultural nationalism, and socialism coexisted in the focal point of revolution against the British Raj. The revolutionaries of that period were not fragmented by ideological turf wars. The Hindu spiritual ethos gave them purpose, cultural nationalism gave them identity, and socialism gave them an egalitarian vision. It was a powerful fusion the British could neither fathom nor defeat — a unity forged not in committee halls, but in the hidden cells of resistance, in the crack of gunfire, and in the thunderous slogan of Vande Mataram.

Let us be clear that Khudiram did not believe in peaceful petitions to the same empire that had reduced India to famine,........

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