Person · nonviolent Pashtun leader
Abdul Ghaffār Khān (Bāchā Khān)
Born at Utmānzai in Charsadda in 1890, he built the Khudai Khidmatgār — the Servants of God, the Red Shirts — into a disciplined nonviolent movement of around a hundred thousand Pashtuns, which is the least likely fact about the frontier in the twentieth century. He allied with the Congress, opposed Partition, and spent roughly thirty years in prison, under the British and then under Pakistan. He was called the Frontier Gandhi, disliked the name, and was given the Bharat Ratna in 1987.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
He asked to be buried at Jalālābād in Afghanistan rather than in Pakistan, and when he died in 1988 both sides of the Afghan war declared a ceasefire for the funeral procession to cross the Khyber; an estimated two hundred thousand people attended.
Connections (4)
- Samadhi atJalālābād
Bāchā Khān asked to be buried at Jalālābād rather than in Pakistan, where he had spent much of his life in prison, and the choice was a statement: the Pashtun country he had organised did not stop at the Durand Line. He died at Peshawar in January 1988 and the funeral procession crossed the Khyber. Both sides of the Afghan war declared a ceasefire to let it pass, and an estimated two hundred thousand people attended — the only occasion on which that war stopped for anything.
- Route adjacencyQissa Khwāni Bazaar, Peshawar
The Khudai Khidmatgār were the demonstrators fired on at Qissa Khwāni on 23 April 1930, and the massacre is what made the movement national news. Bāchā Khān had been arrested days before; his unarmed volunteers filled the bazaar and were shot at, and two platoons of Garhwali soldiers refused the order to fire and were court-martialled. That a nonviolent movement of a hundred thousand Pashtuns existed at all was widely disbelieved in India until this, and it is the event that ended the disbelief.
- BirthplacePushkalāvatī / Charsadda
Bāchā Khān was born in 1890 at Utmānzai, in Charsadda district — the same district as Pushkalāvatī, the Gandharan capital, a few kilometres away. He started with schools: the Azad Islamia madrasas, on the conviction that the frontier's problem was illiteracy rather than the British, and the Khudai Khidmatgār grew out of that work in the 1920s. The movement was organised from villages of this plain, which is why Charsadda and Mardan rather than Peshawar were its strongholds.
- Alternative toThe Faqīr of Ipi (Mīrzālī Khān)
Two answers from the same people at the same moment. From 1936 the Faqīr of Ipi fought the British in Waziristan with a few hundred men, tied down tens of thousands of troops for eleven years, was bombed from the air and never caught. From 1929 Bāchā Khān organised a hundred thousand Pashtuns in Charsadda and Mardan into a nonviolent movement and went to prison for about thirty years. Both wanted the British gone and neither accepted Pakistan afterwards; the frontier produced the century's most disciplined nonviolent movement and its most persistent insurgency simultaneously.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Abdul Ghaffar Khan”. Abdul Ghaffar Khan, My Life and Struggle (1969); Mukulika Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed (2000).
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