Sept. 25: Although a meeting with Nawaz Sharif is not on Narendra Modi's calendar in New York, the ghost of Ufa -where they last met - is pursuing Modi to San Francisco in other ways.

From Suva to Shanghai and from Dubai to Dublin, the Prime Minister has missed no opportunity abroad to celebrate pravasi heritage, but in Ufa he inexplicably glossed over a glorious chapter in the legacy of Indians abroad. Modi hopes to make amends for it on the US west coast this weekend where this legacy is interred.

More than once during his stay at Ufa in Russia, Modi had driven through a street in that city that is named after a proud son of Bhopal, Maulana Barkatullah.

But in the pressurised environment in which the Prime Minister found himself because of the demands of neighbourhood diplomacy, nobody even told Modi that the street had a link to the first provisional government of free India set up in Kabul on December 1, 1915, according to officials who were with Modi in Russia in July.

This entity, known to historians as "government-in-exile of Free Hindustan", had Mahendra Pratap, son of the then Raja of Hathras, as President. Barkatullah, whose full name was Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barkatullah, was Prime Minister. Chempakaraman Pillai, a native of Thiruvananthapuram, was the government's foreign minister.

Because Jawaharlal Nehru recorded his impression of Mahendra Pratap after a meeting as "a Don Quixote... a character out of a medieval romance", the Congress party has subsequently excommunicated the Kabul experiment from the theology of India's freedom movement.

Unmindful of the Congress party's rejection of Mahendra Pratap, Barkatullah and other leaders of the government-in-exile, Arjun Singh, when he became chief minister of Madhya Pradesh for the second time, renamed Bhopal University as Barkatullah University. Bhopalis set great store by Barkatullah's contribution to the freedom struggle.

At a time the BJP and its government are taking a look at history through lenses not tinted by Congress ideology, Modi is likely to make amends for his omission in Ufa by paying tributes to the Ghadar party's activities in San Francisco in the early 20th century.

Barkatullah was one of the leaders of the Ghadar party when it was founded in San Francisco in 1913. He died in the "golden state" a week ago today in 1927. His funeral carcade from San Francisco to a Muslim cemetery in Maryville, California, was an early landmark of Indian presence in America.

There is speculation that in his speech to the Indian-American community in the Bay area, Modi may announce his government's intention to bring back to India Barkatullah's body, which is interred in a coffin in Maryville. Barkatullah's last wish, recorded by Ghadar party associates, was that his remains should find a resting place in his motherland.

The British rulers, who branded Barkatullah as a terrorist and a traitor, would not have allowed it but Modi's visit to San Francisco, home to a Ghadar party memorial, has presented a rare opportunity to rewrite an under-recognised chapter in the history of this country's freedom struggle.

When the centenary of the Ghadar movement - whose objective was to free India from British rule - was approaching, Vayalar Ravi, the minister for overseas Indian affairs in the UPA government, had mounted pressure on the Congress party saying the centenary should be duly acknowledged.

Chempakaraman Pillai's association with Ghadar leaders like Barkatullah may have influenced Ravi's break from the conventional Congress line.

As a result, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas held in Kochi in 2003 that "the Ghadar movement... was a luminous spark of support in distant California for the struggle for independence being waged at home in our country. Apart from commemorating it by the issue of a special postage stamp, we will also upgrade the Ghadar memorial in San Francisco into a functional museum and library with a sculpture to honour the Ghadari babas, the heroes of the great movement."

In 2003, on the 90th anniversary of the movement, another Malayali in public life, former President K.R. Narayanan, had gone to San Francisco to be chief guest at a commemoration by Indian American organisations whose leadership is made up mostly of non-resident Keralites.

The Ghadar memorial is now maintained by the Indian consulate in San Francisco, which uses its hall for public functions on occasions like Independence Day.

Barkatullah's Ufa connection, which Modi missed during his stay in the capital of Bashkortostan, is perhaps far more exciting than his association with the Ghadar movement. Barkatullah, a polyglot who spoke Turkish and Japanese among the seven languages he mastered, befriended Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya when they were living in exile in Switzerland in the first decade of the 20th century.

The Japanese had just terminated Barkatullah's tenure as professor of Urdu in Tokyo university, forcing him to move to Europe.

After Lenin arrived in St Petersburg and the Bolsheviks consolidated their power, he sent a message to Barkatullah through Socialist International asking him to go to Russia for the first anniversary of the October revolution. That was a cover.

Once he had arrived in St Petersburg, Lenin requested Barkatullah to go to Ufa as his special envoy. The Bashkirs, natives of Bashkortostan, were resisting the Red Army and, as Muslims, did not want to be part of the new communist state. Lenin did not have any trusted Bolshevik Muslim Russians to deal with the Bashkirs.

Barkatullah accepted the mission, went to Ufa and negotiated the peaceful surrender of Bashkortostan. The Bashkir army became part of the Red Army in 1919. In return, Barkatullah arranged, with Lenin's consent, safe passage for the Bashkir elite - about 500 families - to Crimea and onward to Turkey, a country where he had influential contacts.

The street in Ufa named after Barkatullah - sometimes known as Barkatullah Bhopali - is a tribute to the integration of a Muslim province in Russia into what became the Soviet Union.