Skip to main content
Kompass

Thinkers and political figures

Photographic portrait of Chandra Shekhar Azad with a moustache.

Portrait: Photograph, via Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab) · Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0

Chandra Shekhar Azad

Country
India
Era
1906–1931
Tradition
Revolutionary socialism

Commander of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, who reorganised the revolutionary movement around an explicitly socialist programme and shot himself rather than be taken alive at twenty-four.

01

Documented positions

Documented positions come from the sources listed. Similarity is this project’s inference from those positions, and is a much weaker claim.

  • Reorganised the Hindustan Republican Association as explicitly socialist, adding "Socialist" to its name in 1928
  • Held that armed action was necessary because constitutional agitation had produced no transfer of power
  • Planned the killing of the police officer held responsible for the assault that killed Lala Lajpat Rai
  • Argued for a free India constituted as a socialist republic based on universal suffrage
  • Rejected the Gandhian suspension of non-cooperation in 1922 as a betrayal of the mobilised population
02

Where it sits on each dimension

Wealth and inequality

10

Evidence: Documented

Tradition and change

80

Evidence: Documented

Nation and the world

92

Evidence: Well documented

Dimensions left unscored, for want of evidence: The state in the economy, Personal liberty, Religion and the state, Power and its limits, Environment and growth, Crime and punishment

Sources

  • Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, The Philosophy of the Bomb (HSRA manifesto) · 1930
  • Manmath Nath Gupta, Bhagat Singh and His Times · Lipi Prakashan · 1977

Last verified: