Sewa Singh Thikriwala Ji, born 1886 in Thikriwala village, Barnala district, launched the Riyasati Praja Mandal on 17 July 1928.
The movement was directed against the princely states rather than the British directly, which is a large part of why it is absent from the standard account of the freedom struggle.
He died in Patiala jail in 1935 after a long hunger strike. Punjab ministers still mark his martyrdom anniversary; the 90th was marked in 2025.
The Praja Mandal movement is the missing half of Punjab's independence history. British Punjab had the Congress, the Akalis and the Ghadar tradition. The princely states, which held a third of the province's population, had this: an agitation against maharajas rather than against viceroys, and one that the national movement was reluctant to support because the princes were treated as a separate constitutional question.
Patiala state's response was arrest, confiscation and imprisonment, and it did not need to answer to anyone for it. A political prisoner in a princely state had no access to the courts that a prisoner in British territory had.
Sewa Singh Thikriwala Ji died in Patiala jail on hunger strike. His village has a memorial and the movement he led has no published history in English and very little in Punjabi. The muzara agitation that followed in the same territory ten years later is its direct descendant.