Phrase used by members of the Indian independence movement, which did not actually originate with Singh. In a Letter published in The Tribune (25 December 1929) http://naxalrevolution.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/bhagat-singh-on-the-slogan-of-‘long-live-revolution’/, Singh stated:
We are not the originators of this cry. The same cry had been used in Russain revolutionary movement. Upton Sinclair, the well known socialist writer, has, in his recent novels Boston and Oil, used this cry through some of the anarchist revolutionary characters. The phrase never means that the sanguinary strife should ever continue, or that nothing should ever be stationary even for a short while. By long usage this cry achieves a significance which may not be quite justifiable from the grammatical or the etymological point of view, but nevertheless we cannot abstract from that the association of ideas connected with that.
All such shouts denote a general sense which is partly acquired and partly inherent in them. For instance, when we shout “Long Live Jatin Das”, we cannot and do not mean thereby that Das should Physically be alive. What we mean by that shout is that the noble ideal of his life, the indomitable spirit which enabled that great martyr to bear such untold suffering and to make the extreme sacrifice for that we may show the same unfailing courage in persuance of our ideal. It is that spirit that we allude to.
Misattributed
