Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh

Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh

Subject – History

Context – Two years after Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh had not received the recognition due to him for having donated land for Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), and promised to construct a university in the same city in his name, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday (September 14) laid the foundation stone of the university.

Concept –

• Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh was a freedom fighter, revolutionary, writer, social reformer, and internationalist who entered Lok Sabha as an Independent candidate from Mathura in 1957, in an election in which Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh came fourth.
• Mahendra Pratap established a “Provisional Government of India” in Kabul in the middle of World War I in 1915 and, as the British government targeted him for his activities, based himself in Japan.
• In 1932, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
• The Raja finally returned to India a year before Independence, and immediately began work with Mahatma Gandhi. In free India, he diligently pursued his ideal of panchayati raj.
• He was not a political figure. He was more of a reformer who promoted education. He gave his own residence to establish the first technical school of the country. He was well versed in eight different languages, he practised different religions, he founded the world federation, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, he set up a Provisional Government of India in Afghanistan.
• Raja gave up his own residence in Mathura to be converted into a technical school named Prem Mahavidyalaya in 1909. It is said to have been the country’s first polytechnic.
• After studying at the Government School in Aligarh, Raja Mahendra Pratap went to the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh, which later came to be called Aligarh Muslim University.
• Although he was unable to complete his graduation from the institution, Raja Mahendra Pratap’s name is counted among the prominent alumni of the university.
• His family is said to have given land to AMU, some parts of which were donation, while other parts were granted on lease. Raja Mahendra Pratap too, gave land to various educational institutions.

Contribution to the Freedom Struggle

• Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh is said to have left his estate in 1914 to plunge into India’s struggle for independence.
• On December 1, 1915, he proclaimed the first Provisional Government of India outside India at the historic Bagh-e-Babur in Kabul.
• He declared himself president, and his fiery fellow revolutionary Maulana Barkatullah of Bhopal, prime minister, of the Provisional Government.
• Mahendra Pratap subsequently travelled to various countries to gather support for the revolutionaries fighting for independence in India.
• He went to Germany, Japan, and Russia, and met the political leaders of those countries. He is said to have met Vladimir Lenin in 1919, two years after the Bolshevik Revolution.