Bhagat Singh was an Indian anti-colonial revolutionary, who participated in the mistaken murder of a junior British police officer in December 1928 in what was to be retaliation for the death of an Indian nationalist. He later took part in a largely symbolic bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi and a hunger strike in jail, which—on the back of sympathetic coverage in Indian-owned newspapers—turned him into a household name in the Punjab region, and after his execution at age 23 into a martyr and folk hero in Northern India. Borrowing ideas from Bolshevism and anarchism, the charismatic Singh electrified a growing militancy in India in the 1930s, and prompted urgent introspection within the Indian National Congress's nonviolent but eventually successful campaign for India's independence.

The Central Legislative Assembly was the lower house of the Imperial Legislative Council, the legislature of British India. It was created by the Government of India Act 1919, implementing the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms. It was also sometimes called the Indian Legislative Assembly and the Imperial Legislative Assembly. The Council of State was the upper house of the legislature for India.