“All religions are a collection of ideas given to the human race for the sake of human well-being. (There must be) unity of religions. They only differ because they were produced at different times and in different spaces… Governments today are the worst disturbers of peace.

This is what the opening notes of My Life Story of Fifty Five Years say – a memoir by Raja Mahendra Pratap (1886-1979), the Jat Raja of Mursan, Hathras.

In recent times, there has been a resurgence of interest in Raja. Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week laid the foundation stone for a state university that bears his name. The interest is less because of what Mahendra Pratap stood for, and more, it seems, for political gain! Because, the Raja was a very unusual freedom fighter.

The third son of the Raja of Mursan, he was adopted by the Raja of Hathras, and married to the Princess of Jind, while studying at MAO College, Aligarh. MAO College founder Sir Syed and Mahendra Pratap’s father Raja Ghanshyam were close. In 1920, MAO College (Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College) became the Muslim University of Aligarh. One of the BJP’s requests ironically has been for AMU to be named Mahendra Pratap.

It was during his time at MAO College, in the first decade of the 20th century, that the campus saw a growing revolt against the British. It all started when Judge Syed Mahmood, son of Sir Syed, was removed from his post as college secretary in 1899, apparently at the behest of British loyalists.

In 1903, Hasrat Mohani, a student who had started the fiercely anti-colonial periodical Urdu-e-Mualla, was imprisoned. In 1905, college students attended the Benaras session of Congress, chaired by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. A year later, the Aligarh Student Union passed a resolution advocating Hindu-Muslim political cooperation to expel the British. In 1907 there was a massive student strike led, among others, by Syed Mahmud (who later served in Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet). As students began to paint portraits of Gokhale, German Emperor Wilhelm II, and leaders of the Ottoman Empire in their hotel rooms, the British kept an anxious watch.

Mahendra Pratap was among the students who wanted to change the system, but he differed from others in that he globalized India’s freedom struggle between 1915 and 1945 – traveling the world, giving lectures, writing articles and raising funds.

He also wrote to Gokhale seeking to travel to South Africa to join Mahatma Gandhi, who had launched a Satyagraha there, but was dissuaded by the head of Congress. The Raja then offered 1,000 rupees (then a royal sum) for the cause. In 1906, he attended the congressional session in Calcutta, against the will of his father-in-law, the ruler of Jind, who feared British wrath. In 1910, Mahendra Pratap was part of the hosting committee of the Allahabad session of Congress. In his memoirs, he speaks of proposing a “religion of love”, and thus founded Prem Mahavidyalaya or Free Industrial & Arts National College (one of the first polytechnics in India), in Mathura.

In personal life, too, the Raja broke barriers by eating with a sweeper in Agra. He launched periodicals such as Prem and Nirbal Sewak. He also joined Ghadar’s revolutionaries, based abroad, who supported a mutiny in the British army.

As the need arose to increase Indian demand globally, on December 1, 1915, his birthday, the Raja announced a provisional Indian government in exile in Kabul. He was the president and his revolutionary colleague Maulana Barkatullah the prime minister. This became known as the “Silk Letter Conspiracy”.

His plan was to form “an international socialist army for the freedom of India”. He opened offices in Germany and Japan, met Rash Behari Bose and raised funds for him, notably in Afghanistan and Turkey.

The Raja also befriended leaders such as Afghan King Amanullah, whom he admired for modernizing his country. He notes that he observed Buddha Jayanti there, and that despite Ramzan’s fast, many Afghan Muslims showed up (a past that the Bamiyan vandals chose to forget).

After the Bolshevik revolution, he writes that he met Lenin as part of a “plan to surround India with an anti-British empire and pro-Indian states”. He said that Germany in the West and Japan in the East were destroying the British, and therefore the only challenge for the Indians was to minimize the gap between the rich and the poor and the Hindus and the Muslims, for gain freedom.

He also advocated an “Aryan Federation” within Congress – proposing a language from all over India with Roman characters, borrowing single words from different dialects, for linguistic uniformity. The Aryans, he said, shared cultures from Iran to Assam, and it was a step towards global unity.

“I want to liberate England, India, Germany, Japan from their warlords,” he said, saying Hitler, Mussolini, militaristic Japan were all welcome. “Why should I condemn those whose mutual conflicts primarily strike empires.”

Impressed, the Mathura district congressional unit proposed to name the township of the provincial congress session in their name and erect a life-size statue of Raja.

It is said that the Raja was happy, but disapproved of a statue.

The writer is a professor at AMU and specializes in modern Indian history