A Government in Kabul
The Jat prince from Hathras who declared a government of India in a Kabul garden, with Barkatullah and Obaidullah Sindhi as his ministers
On his twenty-ninth birthday, 1 December 1915, Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh stood in Bagh-e-Babur at Kabul and proclaimed a Provisional Government of India, with Maulana Barkatullah as Prime Minister and Maulana Obaidullah Sindhi as Home Minister. It held no territory, commanded no soldiers, and was dissolved in January 1919 when Afghanistan withdrew its shelter. This lesson follows him from Vrindavan to Berlin to that garden, and on through thirty-two years abroad to the Mathura seat he won in 1957.
The Garden Above Kabul
It is Wednesday, 1 December 1915. In Kabul, on the terraced slopes of Bagh-e-Babur, the garden where the first Mughal emperor is buried, a small group of men is standing in the cold. The plane trees are bare. Below them the Kabul river runs thin in winter, and the mud-brick city climbs the hills on both sides.
One of them is a Jat prince from Mursan, in Hathras district, and today is his twenty-ninth birthday. His name is Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh. He has come here overland from Berlin, through Vienna, Constantinople and forty nights of Persian desert, travelling with German officers in Afghan clothes.
He reads out a proclamation. It declares a Provisional Government of India, a government of free Hindustan, in exile. He is its President. Beside him stand the two men who will be his Prime Minister and his Home Minister.
The government he has just declared holds no territory. It has no army, no treasury, and no country that recognises it. It will last three years and change nothing on the ground in India. And yet the British Indian government will spend the next thirty years making sure this man never comes home.
Who He Was Before Kabul
Mahendra Pratap was born on 1 December 1886 into the ruling family of Mursan. At the age of three he was adopted by Raja Harnarayan Singh of Hathras. That made him the heir of an estate. It also gave him the title he carried for the rest of his life.
He went to the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, the college that later became Aligarh Muslim University. He did not finish his degree. In 1902 he married Balveer Kaur, a Sikh princess of Jind.
