Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh: A Nationalist and Reformer

• 15 Sep 2021

On 14^th September 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone of Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh State University in Aligarh (UP).

About Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh

• Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh was born into the ruling Jat family of Mursan estate in Hathras in 1886.
• Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh was a freedom fighter, revolutionary, writer, social reformer, and internationalist.
• Raja gave up his own residence in Mathura to be converted into a technical school named Prem Mahavidyalaya in 1909.
• 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 Singh, who was an alumnus of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, which later became the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), had given 3.04 acres of land to the university on lease for constructing a school in 1929.
• In 1929, Mahendra Pratap launched the ‘World Federation’ in Berlin.
• He was nominated for the 1932 Nobel Peace Prize by the Swedish doctor N A Nilsson, who was a member of the Commission of the Permanent International Peace Bureau.
• After almost 32 years of exile, Mahendra Pratap Singh finally returned to India in 1946.
• He entered Lok Sabha as an Independent candidate from Mathura in 1957.