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Shivaram Hari Rajguru (24 August 1908 – 23 March 1931) was an Indian revolutionary and a member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. He is best known for his part in the shooting of the British police officer J. P. Saunders at Lahore on 17 December 1928, for which he was tried in the Lahore Conspiracy Case and hanged at Lahore Central Jail on 23 March 1931 alongside Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev Thapar. He was twenty-two.

He was born on 24 August 1908 at Khed, a town on the Bhima river in the Pune district of the Bombay Presidency, into a Marathi Deshastha Brahmin family. His parents were Hari Narayan Rajguru and Parvati Devi, and he had an elder brother, Dinkar. His father died when he was about six. Khed was later renamed Rajgurunagar in his honour.

Because they were tried together in the Lahore Conspiracy Case, sentenced to death on the same day — 7 October 1930 — and hanged together on the evening of 23 March 1931 at Lahore Central Jail. The grouping is historically exact, and 23 March is observed across India as Shaheed Diwas, Martyrs' Day, for all three.

A party from the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association waited outside the District Police Headquarters at Lahore intending to kill Superintendent James A. Scott, who had ordered the lathi charge in which Lala Lajpat Rai was injured. Jai Gopal gave the signal when a young officer left on a motorcycle. Rajguru fired the first shot and Bhagat Singh fired further shots. The officer was Assistant Superintendent John P. Saunders, not Scott — a mistaken identification. Head constable Chanan Singh, who gave chase, was shot dead by Chandra Shekhar Azad.

No. The bombs thrown in the Central Legislative Assembly on 8 April 1929 were the act of Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt, who deliberately allowed themselves to be arrested in order to obtain a courtroom platform. Rajguru had no part in it. The two episodes are frequently merged in popular accounts, but they are separate events, months apart, with different participants.

He was arrested at Pune on 30 September 1929, after nine and a half months at liberty following the shooting at Lahore. A pistol and fourteen cartridges were recovered. He was taken to Lahore and joined to the proceedings already under way.

Formally Crown v. Sukhdev and others, it was the prosecution arising from the killing of J. P. Saunders and from the activities of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. Committal proceedings opened on 10 July 1929 inside Borstal Jail, Lahore, with twenty-eight accused. The charges included murder, conspiracy to murder, and waging war against the King — which allowed the Crown to place the entire organisation on trial rather than three individuals.

Because the court that convicted the accused was created for the case by executive decree. On 1 May 1930 the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, promulgated Ordinance III of 1930 establishing a three-judge Special Tribunal that could proceed in the absence of the accused, with no appeal except to the Privy Council.

When the accused were beaten in court on 12 May 1930, Justice Agha Haidar protested, refused to sign the record, and was removed from the bench. The ordinance lapsed after roughly six months; the judgment it produced stood.

He was hanged at Lahore Central Jail on the evening of 23 March 1931, at about seven o'clock — roughly twelve hours earlier than the scheduled morning of 24 March, and at dusk rather than dawn, because the authorities feared public disorder. Rajguru was twenty-two. Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev Thapar were both twenty-three.

The bodies were not returned to the families. They were removed at night through a breach cut in the rear wall of the jail, taken towards Ferozepur, and cremated in haste near the village of Ganda Singh Wala on the banks of the Sutlej; the remains were consigned to the river.

Accounts of the detail vary, but it is not disputed that the families were denied the bodies and that the cremation was secret and nocturnal. The site is commemorated today as the National Martyrs Memorial at Hussainiwala.

The H.S.R.A. was a revolutionary organisation formed in September 1928 at a meeting in the ruins of Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, reconstituting the Hindustan Republican Association of 1924. It had a central committee for political direction and a military wing under Chandra Shekhar Azad.

The addition of the word “socialist” committed it to a social and economic programme, not only to ending British rule. Rajguru belonged to its military wing under the party alias “Raghunath”.

This is disputed. Some accounts, including entries in widely used reference works, place him among the participants at Kakori in August 1925. He would have been sixteen, most detailed chronologies put his entry into organised revolutionary work later, and he was not among those charged in the Kakori proceedings. The evidence is thin and this archive records the claim as unresolved rather than adopting it.

No writings, letters, statements or memoirs by Rajguru are in general circulation. Unlike Bhagat Singh, who left essays, letters and a jail notebook, he left no known text of his own. Quotations circulating under his name should be treated as unverified unless a contemporary source can be named. This is the central difficulty in writing his biography — and the reason this archive contains no quotations attributed to him.

The town of Khed in Pune district, Maharashtra, was renamed Rajgurunagar in his honour after independence. Both names remain in local use and the surrounding taluka is still called Khed. The family's ancestral house there — Rajguru Wada, a plot of roughly 2,788 square metres on the bank of the Bhima — is maintained as a memorial, where the national flag has been hoisted each Republic Day since 2004.

Shaheed Diwas, or Martyrs' Day, is observed across India on 23 March, the anniversary of the execution of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru at Lahore in 1931. Wreaths are laid at the National Martyrs Memorial at Hussainiwala and at memorial sites elsewhere. India also observes 30 January as Martyrs' Day for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi; the two are distinct observances.