Members of the committee included Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (alias Chatto), Chempakaraman Pillai, Dr Jnanendra Das Gupta, and Abinash Bhattacharya.
Savarkar was deported from England, and denied asylum by the French government on a stop in Marseilles) while Krishna Varma successfully fled to Europe.
As early as 1912, the German Foreign Office had considered supporting the Pan-Islamist and Bengali revolutionary movement in India to weaken the British position.
A group of Indians resident in Germany, headed by M. Prabhakar (then teaching at Düsseldorf after graduating from Heidelberg), along with Abd ur Rahman and A Siddiqui, had issued statements condemning England and France for their support of the Czar in Russia.
Otto Gunther von Wesendonck, a young officer of the Auswärtiges Amt, was given the task of organising revolutionary outbreaks along the Indian and Russian border.
[4] With the help of their close acquaintance Anna Maria Simon, Abhinash Bhattacharya and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya issued similar statements against Britain and France, which were distributed in Austria-Hungary, Switzerland and the Netherlands in addition to Germany, attracting editorial comments.
[1] Although the group urged him, Oppenheim refused to approach Shyamji Krishnavarma, then in Geneva, nor did he try to reach Lala Lajpat Rai, then in the United States.
The latter was suspected by British intelligence in the United States to be deeply involved in the seditionist movement[5] although he personally refused to enter an alliance with another Imperialist Power.
They visited armament and explosives factories to identify war material, and met with Indian prisoners-of-war held in Germany to recruit them to the nationalist cause.
Another group, led by the Deobandi Maulana Ubaid Allah Sindhi and Mahmud al-Hasan (principle of the Darul Uloom Deoband), had traveled to Kabul in October 1915 with plans to initiate a Muslim insurrection in the tribal belt of India.
Ubaid Allah proposed that the Amir of Afghanistan should declare war against Britain while Mahmud al Hasan sought German and Turkish help.
At Kabul, Ubaid Allah, along with some students who had preceded him to Ottoman Turkey to join the Caliph's "Jihad" against Britain, decided that the pan-Islamic cause would be better served by focusing on the Indian Freedom Movement.
In 1918, Pratap met the Russian leader Leon Trotsky in Petrograd before meeting the Kaiser in Berlin; he urged both to mobilise against British India.
It catalyzed political change that ended with the assassination of Habibullah in 1919 and the transfer of power to Nasrullah and, subsequently, Amānullah; the Third Anglo-Afghan War began, which led to Afghan Independence.