The first session takes up a question the Reading Circle begins with: what does it mean for a student to take politics seriously? Not as an observer, not as someone with opinions, but as someone with a programme.
Both texts are by Bhagat Singh. The first, Students and Politics, was written in 1928 and published in The Kirti. It is a direct argument against the position — then as now — that students should stay out of politics until they are older, more qualified, more settled. Bhagat Singh’s answer is unsparing: an education that produces political ignorance is not education. It is preparation for servitude.
The second, To Young Political Workers, was composed on 2 February 1931 — nineteen days before his execution. It is not a farewell. It is a programme. He examines the conditions under which political compromise is necessary and when it is not; he analyses why the Congress movement is bound to fail; and he calls on young workers to build a communist party, organize the peasants and labourers, and understand that revolution is not an event but a decades-long practice of collective work.
Read together, these two texts move from why students must engage with politics to how that engagement must be organized. The discussion will follow the same arc.
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