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Death of an Unsung Hero

Sreelatha Menon

Shivpuri: When the three heroes of the INA trial were released in 1945, it called for national celebration. But recently when the last of three Col Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon passed away, there are no mourners. His remains lied in an urn in the prayer room of his farmhouse cum residence in the remote Hatod village in Shivpuri district of Madhya Pradesh.

The remains stayed there for days waiting for mourners to pay their last respects to the national hero of India’s freedom movement a month after his death on February 6.

The cold response of the powers that be in the government of India to the passing away of Col Dhillon prompted his son Sarbjit to wait with the remains of his father till someone who represented the country would come and pay respects to the departed hero. “I hoped to immerse the remains in the holy waters at Kiratpur. But I wanted to wait as long as I could for the important people of this country to pay their respect for Col Dhillon,’’ says Sarbjit.

“He was not just my father. He belonged to the whole country. So I wanted the country to claim him as its own,’’ he says with tears of bitterness in his eyes.

Col Dhillon lived in that little farmhouse at Shivpuri since 1950 away from the din and noise of the outside world. “I cannot understand why the Parliament is ashamed of saying two words to pay respect to Col Dhillon’s memory. He died on February 6 after being in the ICU for a month in a Galion hospital. But no one from the Government of India bothered to either enquire after his health or to pay condolence.’’

Finally a message arrived on February 22 nearly three weeks later from the President of India expressing grief over the departure of Col Dhillon, says Sarbjit.

But the rest of the Government or the national media is yet to be moved into taking notice, he says

He had also written a long letter to former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijay Singh, currently a General Secretary in Congress asking him to convey the message to the Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.

He urged Singh to tell the government that Dhillon should be given the honour he deserves during his last journey. He urged that the INA heroes whose release after the INA trial became a turning point in the freedom movement should be honoured in Parliament by installing their portraits there.

But till this date, no one even has bothered to make a passing mention of his death in Parliament, says Satvir Dhillon who has been looking after the farms that Col Dhillon retreated to in 1950 five years after the INA trial.

He says that his father would have got angry had he known what Sarbjit was doing. But Sarbjit Dhillon has an explanation for what he is doing. “I am doing this so that the youth and the present generation knows about their glorious history,’’ he says.

“Today Dhillon does not matter to the country. He is merely a hero of remote Shivpuri and maybe Madhya Pradesh the state where he found a home after the INA trial. For the rest of the country and its media, the heroes are industrialists and film stars,’’ says Sarbjit.

Recalling his father’s journey to Shivpuri a district near Gwalior in 1952, he says: I was two years old and my father had decided to leave Punjab for good after his father’s death.

He was penniless and he was traveling in a train. He kept looking at fields when a poet of this area Ghasiram noticed Dhillon’s name on the suitcase and exclaimed aloud. My father told him that he was Col Dhillon of the Red fort trial and was looking for a remote place where he could find some land for farming.

“Ghasiram brought him to Hatod village in Shivpuri and since then we have lived here in the middle of what used to be dense forests just the way he wanted it to be,” says Sarbjit.

Today the picture on the walls of the Dhillon home showing a modest Dhillon standing behind a row of political bigwigs like the then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayi and Home Minister L K Advani. But VIPs seem to have a short memory these days.

(Charkha Features)

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