The Prime Minister and the Wall Newspaper

Every year, as August 15th approaches, the same handful of names surface almost automatically: Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose, Maulana Azad. But the story of India's independence does not end with them. Thousands fought for this country's freedom — some spent years behind prison bars, some went to the gallows, and some spent their entire lives far from home, fighting the British Empire on foreign soil. Their names, today, are difficult to find in our textbooks.

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This is the story of two such freedom fighters: one who served as Prime Minister of a government that once sent a letter, on a plate of gold, from Kabul to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, seeking his help for India's liberation. The other pasted his newspaper directly onto the walls of a Calcutta lane — because the very people he was writing for could not afford to buy it, and most of them could not read it either.

The Prime Minister Almost No One Remembers

Ask most people who India's first Prime Minister was, and nearly everyone will say Jawaharlal Nehru. Few know that even before independence, a provisional government of India had already been formed — and its Prime Minister was Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali.

Born on July 7, 1854, in Bhopal's Itwara neighbourhood, Barkatullah's early education began in Arabic, Persian and Urdu. But his pursuit of knowledge carried him across the globe, and he would go on to master seven languages, including English, German, Japanese and Turkish. He left India in the 1880s, convinced of a simple but radical idea:

"The British Empire could not be broken from within India alone — it had to be encircled from every side."

His first stop was England. In 1895, he was invited to work at the Liverpool Muslim Institute — but the journey turned out to be about far more than employment. It was in England that he was drawn into the revolutionary circles dreaming of India's freedom, and where he came to stand shoulder to shoulder with figures like Lala Hardayal and Raja Mahendra Pratap. His first direct confrontation with British authority came here too: when former British Prime Minister Gladstone made racist and insulting remarks about Indians, Barkatullah answered him in essays and speeches — sharp enough that the British began watching him closely.

He did not stop. His next stop was Japan, where he was appointed Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Tokyo. There he launched a journal, Islamic Fraternity — and when that was banned, he started a newspaper called El Islam, writing against British rule in both Urdu and English. His writing reached all the way back to India, and proved so effective that the British government pressured Japan into shutting that down too.

In 1913, his journey carried him to San Francisco, where he joined the Ghadar Party. His aim there was unambiguous — not petitions, not resolutions, but a direct appeal to Indian soldiers serving in the British army to turn their weapons around. The following year, in 1914, his professorship in Tokyo was terminated under British pressure.

"Think about that for a moment — an entire empire had to intervene just to take away one professor's job. That alone tells you how great a threat Barkatullah had become to the British."

The Ghadar movement's message, meanwhile, was spreading fast — reaching more than a dozen countries, drawing thousands of Indians abroad to abandon their livelihoods and return home for the cause. But Barkatullah's fight was never only against the British — he wanted to unite Indians themselves. In a letter to the poet Hasrat Mohani, he wrote that Indian Muslims carried two duties — one to their nation, one to their faith — and that both could only be fulfilled once Hindus and Muslims stood completely united.

On December 1, 1915, Barkatullah, Raja Mahendra Pratap and Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi arrived in Kabul, and in the Bagh-e-Babur, announced India's first Provisional Government — beyond British reach, outside India's borders altogether. Its cabinet was itself a statement: President Raja Mahendra Pratap, a Hindu king; Prime Minister Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali, a maulana from Bhopal; and Home Minister Maulana Ubaidullah Sindhi, born into a Sikh family before converting to Islam.

"This wasn't just a list of names. It was a picture of the India they were dreaming of — a country that belonged to no single faith."

It was this government that sent its appeal to the Tsar of Russia, and reached out to Germany and Turkey as well. When the Tsar refused, Barkatullah himself travelled to Moscow in 1919 and met Lenin — a maulana, sitting across from a communist revolutionary, with exactly one shared subject on the table: India's freedom.

Barkatullah never returned to his homeland. He died in San Francisco in September 1927, and was buried in Sacramento, at the age of 73 — a life lived across four continents, in service of a free India he never once saw with his own eyes.

The Newspaper Pasted on a Wall

Before turning to the second freedom fighter in this story, it's worth asking a simple question: what did the East India Company target first, on arriving in India? The answer is India's handlooms and handicrafts. Indian cloth was once famous the world over — until the Company's deliberate policies flooded Indian markets with foreign textiles, ruining millions of weavers. That grief, in time, found its way into literature and verse — most famously in Josh Malihabadi's searing address to the "sons of the East India Company," a poem that captured, in the starkest terms, how thoroughly that policy of ruin had settled over the subcontinent's weaving communities.

It was into one such family, ruined by exactly this economic devastation, that Ali Hussain was born on April 15, 1889, in the Khasganj neighbourhood of Bihar Sharif. His family was poor, his trade was weaving — but his inheritance was more than poverty alone. His grandfather, Maulana Abdul Rahman, had been among the leaders of the 1857 uprising in that area.

His formal education ended early. By sixteen, the search for work had taken him to a job at the Usha Company — and it was there that he became involved with the Khilafat Movement. When the Ali brothers, Mohammad Ali Jauhar and Shaukat Ali, were arrested, Ali Hussain began organizing rallies for their mother, known as Bi Amma. The cost followed quickly: he lost his job, and found that no one would hire a man associated with the movement. But the movement had to be kept alive, and there was still a stomach to feed — so he turned to the trade of the city's poorest: rolling beedis by hand. It was around this time that he adopted the pen name by which history would come to know him: Asim Bihari.

This is where his real story begins. While rolling beedis, he formed a circle among his fellow labourers, calling it Darul Muzakara — "the house of debate" — where essays on society and the nation were written, read aloud, and argued over. At just twenty-two, he had already drawn up a five-year plan for adult education. Two years later, he established a literary circle, Bazm-e-Adab, in his hometown of Nalanda.

"Picture that for a moment — a beedi worker, drawing up a five-year plan for the education of his own society."

Then came 1919. In the anger that swept the country after Jallianwala Bagh, Lala Lajpat Rai, Maulana Azad and several other leaders were arrested. Asim Bihari responded with an unusual campaign of his own: an appeal for letters and telegrams demanding their release, sent to the Viceroy from every district, every town, every village he could reach. By some accounts, the number of messages reached close to 150,000.

The following year, he laid the foundation of the Jamiat-ul-Momineen in Calcutta's Tati Bagh — the organization that would go on to become nationally known as the Momin Conference, the first dedicated political voice of India's weavers, artisans and labouring classes. And in April 1921, he began the project that opened this story: a wall newspaper called Al Momin. Essays were written on large sheets of paper and pasted directly onto the walls of narrow lanes — and for those who couldn't read, someone would stand there and read it aloud. It later grew into a regularly printed paper.

"He didn't wait for people to learn to read before giving them a newspaper. He built a newspaper that could reach the literate and the illiterate alike. That's perhaps why he's remembered as the father of the Pasmanda movement."

Gandhi, Maulana Azad and Mohammad Ali Jauhar all attended a gathering at Tati Bagh during this period. Gandhi is said to have offered the organization one lakh rupees — an enormous sum for such an impoverished group at the time — attached to certain conditions. Asim Bihari refused it.

"If this organization is the workers' own voice, it cannot run on anyone else's terms."

Wherever a Momin Conference branch opened, a library opened alongside it, along with education centres and employment initiatives. Asim Bihari himself never once became its president; after considerable persuasion, he accepted the post of General Secretary, and spent the rest of his life pushing others forward instead of himself. The organization set aside a modest stipend for him — one he often didn't even collect. To the beedi workers who knew him, he was simply "Kamali Baba." Within the movement, he was known as Kashti-e-Safir — the travelling ambassador.

By the 1940s, as national politics moved inexorably toward Partition, Asim Bihari opposed it openly. Hindus and Muslims, he argued, had lived together for centuries and could not simply be divided along a drawn line — and he believed the heaviest cost of Partition would fall precisely on the labouring communities already struggling against poverty and injustice.

He died on December 6, 1953, at a home in Allahabad's Atala neighbourhood, and was buried there. He left behind no property, no title — only a movement.

Two Cities, One Destination

Two different cities. Two entirely different paths. And yet, in a sense, one shared destination. One man carried India's demand for freedom onto the map of the world. The other gave voice, from inside India itself, to people no one else particularly wanted to hear. But neither man's fight was only against the British.

"Both were dreaming of an India where freedom wouldn't simply mean a change of rulers — but the foundation for justice, equality, and equal citizenship."

For Barkatullah, a free India was one where a Hindu king and a Muslim maulana could sit in the very same cabinet. For Asim Bihari, freedom meant a country where a weaver's son could get an education, where a labourer could have a political voice of his own, and where society's most marginalized could live with their heads held high.

The Ledger the Books Forgot to Keep

This story, though, was never only about these two men. It belongs to hundreds of others who gave their lives to India's freedom and whose names, too, are slipping from memory: Ashfaqullah Khan, hanged at just twenty-seven after the Kakori conspiracy; Hasrat Mohani, who raised the cry of Inquilab Zindabad and was the first to demand complete independence rather than dominion status; Saifuddin Kitchlew, whose arrest brought the crowd together that was fired upon at Jallianwala Bagh; Begum Hazrat Mahal, who led the resistance in Awadh in 1857; Peer Ali Khan, hanged in Patna that same year; Sheikh-ul-Hind Maulana Mahmud Hasan, who spent years imprisoned on the island of Malta; and Bi Amma, whose voice helped carry the Khilafat Movement across the entire country.

The list is long — and, in all likelihood, still incomplete, because so many of these names never made it into our textbooks at all.

"Today, an entire community is repeatedly asked to produce proof of its loyalty. But the question was never whether the proof exists. It's recorded on every page of history. The only real question is why we were never taught to read those pages."

Remembering Is a Political Act

Perhaps that's exactly why this particular struggle still isn't over. The question today is no longer simply who did what for the country — it's who gets a place in our collective memory, and whose name gets quietly erased from it.

Consider one example. A university in Bhopal has carried the name Barkatullah for roughly four decades. On June 3, 2026, its Executive Council unanimously decided to remove that name; the file now sits with the Governor. The stated rationale, reportedly, is that Barkatullah made no particular contribution to the region compared to Raja Bhoj — beyond simply having been born there.

Consider what that means: a man who served as Prime Minister of India's first provisional government, who gave his entire life to this country's freedom, described as having made "no particular contribution." Asim Bihari's case is quieter still — nothing was ever named after him in the first place. One man's grave lies in Sacramento; the other's in Allahabad. One never lived to see an independent India. The other did — though perhaps not quite the India he had spent his life dreaming of.

This Independence Day, when the tri-colour goes up, it's worth remembering not only the names we've been taught to recite — but also the ones being slowly erased from memory. Because history isn't only written. It has to be remembered, too. And remembering, in the end, is itself a political act.