120. Baba BuJha Singh of Gadar Party

Parrkash Singh Badal took oath as C M Punjab on 20 June 1970. On the night of July 27 , a former anticolonial freedom fighter was killed by police in false incounter.

A militant group of Indian immigrants who settled on the Pacific Coast of North America. They believed in an armed rebellion against the British occupation of India. As this centenary is being celebrated, Bujha Singh’s story stands as an ugly reminder of how Ghadar activists continued their struggle for social justice even after India gained independence in 1947

The party was launched in 1913 by Indian immigrants who lived in B.C., Washington, Oregon, and California. Later, it spread its wings and those who lived in faraway places siuch as South America also established branches.

These immigrants had mostly migrated to this hemisphere as British subjects as India was under British occupation. Canada, too, was a British colony back then. Systemic racism and discriminatory immigration policies disillusioned most of these people because British consuls rarely intervened to help these immigrants whenever there was a racial violence against them in the U.S. or Canada.

. Formally known as Hindi Pacific Association, it came to be known as the Ghadar Party after the launching of its official newspaper called Ghadar in Urdu  which means "mutiny". Bujha Singh, who worked in Argentina, was instrumental in creating a chapter in that country 

   It soon dawned upon these people that the root cause of their suffering was slavery back home. This whole experience encouraged them to organize and form a pressure group. They resolved to continue their fight against discrimination in their foreign land and against colonialism in India.

   Comrade Bujha Singh deserved state honours for participating in the struggle to rid India of the British occupation. Instead, he got a police bullet. The reason? He joined an uprising of landless tillers who've been revolting against the rich and the elites in India since the 1960s.

   Parrkash Singh Badal took oath as C M Punjab on 20 June 1970. On the night of July 27 or on the early morning of July 28, 1970, a former anticolonial freedom fighter was killed by police in post-independent India.

Baba Bujha Singh was an Indian revolutionary leader. He was an activist of the Ghadar Party and later became a key leader of the Lal Communist Party. Singh later declared as associate of the Naxalite   movement in Punjab.

He was one of the leading organizers of the Ghadar Party in Argentina. Baba Bujha Singh returned to India via Moscow and China.

Baba Bujha Singh would later join the Communist Party of India. Within the Communist Party, he was a prominent figure in the dissident faction that eventually formed the Lal Communist Party in 1948. After the Lal Communist Party was dissolved and largely amalgamated back into the Communist Party of India, Baba Bujha Singh became passive and did not involve himself in party politics.

Baba Bujha Singh deplored the positions adopted by the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held in 1956, labelling the congress as 'anti-communist'. He argued that the 1956 congress would eventually lead to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

He resumed political activism in the wake of the 1967 communist rising. Baba Bujha Singh began contacting left wing dissidents inside the Communist Party of India (Marxist), urging them to rebel against the leadership of the party.

Baba Bujha Singh was arrested on July 28, 1970 and killed in a police encounter near Phillaur. There are references to him in Punjabi literature, for example the poet Shiv Kumar atalvi  wrote the poem Budhe Rukh Nu Fansi in his honour. In 2010, Bakhshinder a journalist turned script writer and film maker started the production of a feature film titled Baba Inqlab Singh, on Baba Bujha Singh's life.

 The Punjab state headquarters of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation  in Mansa is known as Baba Bujha Singh Bhavan.