4 min readAug 17, 2026 06:20 AM IST First published on: Aug 17, 2026 at 06:20 AM ISTKartar Singh Sarabha was 19 years old when the colonial rulers hanged him at the Lahore Central Jail. He had already crossed an ocean, printed a newspaper, and come home knowing exactly what was waiting for him. Bhagat Singh was 23 years old. Madan Lal Dhingra, 25. Most of the men the Ghadar movement sent to the gallows were farmers’ sons from the villages of the Majha, Doaba and Malwa regions who could not have told you the first thing about political theory. They decided that some things were worth more than a life.I want to begin there today because we have got into the habit of thanking our freedom fighters in the abstract — as though they were a category in a history textbook rather than young men with names, families and dreams, born in villages that many of us still drive past. Punjab paid a heavy price for this freedom. At Jallianwala Bagh, in the Ghadar trials, on the Komagata Maru, in the ranks of the INA. And then again in 1947, when the freedom we had bled for arrived as a line drawn across our own house. Millions were uprooted; families broken; a province cut in half, and its people made to walk out of homes their ancestors had built. And here is the part we do not say often enough: They did not become bitter. They arrived in Amritsar, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, and Firozpur with nothing and started again. They ploughed, traded, drove trucks and sent their children to school. They fed this country during the Green Revolution, and guarded it on the borders. Not one of them asked what the nation was going to do for them.AdvertisementSo let me ask the uncomfortable question. Somewhere between that generation and ours, we changed the relationship. We stopped treating India as something we built, and started treating it as something that owes us. We queue at consulates. We take our grievances to the street before we take them to the classroom or the field. We measure a government by what it hands out, and we measure ourselves by very little at all. I do not say this as an accusation against our young people, but as an admission by my generation. We inherited a Punjab that had been rebuilt once, and we did not build on it. We let our water fall, our soil tire, our industry drift, and our best young minds board flights. That failure is ours, not theirs. But here is what gives me hope. The restlessness that took Sarabha to California and our soldiers to Gallipoli and Kohima and our farmers to Rajasthan’s desert is still in us.So to the young men and women of Punjab, and of India, I want to say this. Be revolutionaries again, but choose your revolution well. Wage it against your own limits first. Learn a skill so well the world has to come to you. Finish the degree. Stay off the poison taking our boys one by one. Look after your body and mind. Then go to your street. Teach one child who is falling behind. Save one field’s worth of water. Employ one person. Build something — a business, an institution — rather than assuming everything worth building has to be built somewhere else.That is not a smaller revolution than the one Sarabha fought. We are not yet the country our freedom fighters imagined. We are closer than we have ever been. Whether we get there is not a question for the government. It is a question for the 23-year-olds. Those before us had less, but they gave more.The writer is a former finance minister of Punjab