plan was to arm the indigenous people in the North-East Indian region with modern weaponry. The project had the approval of Lenin. Pratap, obsessed with Tibet, made efforts as early as 1916 to penetrate the kingdom to cultivate anti-British propaganda. He resumed his efforts after his return from Moscow in 1919. Pratap was close to Shcherbatskoy and Sergey Oldenburg. Privy to the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs' designs in the region, he intended to participate in the Kalmyk Project to Tibet in the summer of 1919. The planned expedition was ultimately shelved following the Czech uprising on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Pratap set out alone to unsuccessfully pursue his goal. British India The Hindu–German Conspiracy, which had initially led to the conception of the expedition, Pratap's mission in Afghanistan and his overtures to Bolshevik Russia, and the presence of active revolutionary movements in Punjab and Bengal led to the appointment in British India of a sedition committee in 1918, chaired by Sydney Rowlatt, an English judge. In the midst of worsening civil unrest throughout India, it was tasked to evaluate German and Bolshevik links to the Indian militant movement, especially in Punjab and Bengal. On the recommendations of the committee, the Rowlatt Act (1919), an extension of the Defence of India act of 1915, was enforced in India. A number of events that followed the passage of the Rowlatt Act were influenced by the conspiracy. At the time, British Indian Army troops were returning from the battlefields of Europe and Mesopotamia to an economic depression in India. The Ghadar Conspiracy of 1915 and the Lahore conspiracy trials were still garnering public attention. News was also beginning to reach India of the Indian Voluntary Corps who, influenced by Ghadarites, fought on behalf of the Turkish Caliphate. Mahendra Pratap was shadowed by British agents—among them Frederick Marshman Bailey—during his journeys to and from Germany and Bolshevik Russia. The Third Anglo-Afghan war began in 1919 in the wake of Amir Habibullah's assassination and institution of Amanullah, in a system blatantly influenced by the Kabul mission. When news of the outbreak of war reached Pratap in Berlin, he returned to Kabul, using air transport provided by Germany. It was at this time that the pan-Islamic Khilafat Movement began in India. Gandhi, until then relatively unknown on the Indian political scene, began emerging as a mass leader. His call for protests against the Rowlatt Act achieved