Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
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Fakhr-e
Afghan
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan Bacha Khan |
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Bacha
Khan pictured in the 1940s
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Native name
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Born
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1890
Utmanzai, Hashtnagar, Frontier Tribal Areas of Punjab Province, British India (now Charsadda, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan) |
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Died
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Resting place
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Organization
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Political movement
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Khudai Khidmatgar, Indian Independence Movement
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Religion
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Spouse(s)
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Meharqanda Kinankhel
(m. 1912–1918)
Nambata Kinankhel (m. 1920–1926) |
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Children
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Parents
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Bahram Khan
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Awards
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Khān Abdul Ghaffār Khān (1890 – 20 January 1988) (Pashto:
خان عبدالغفار خان, Urdu:
خان عبدالغفار خان), also known
as Fakhr-e Afghān (Urdu:
فخر افغان, lit. "pride
of Afghans"), and Bāchā Khān (Pashto:
باچا خان, lit. "king of chiefs"),
Pāchā Khān or Bādshāh Khān, was an independence activist
of Pashtun descent. He was a political and spiritual leader known for
his nonviolent opposition to the British Raj in British India, and a lifelong pacifist
and devout Muslim. A close friend of Mahatma Gandhi, Bacha Khan has been called the "Frontier Gandhi"
by the Indians. In 1910, Bacha Khan opened a mosque school at his hometown Utmanzai, and in 1911 joined the freedom movement of Haji Sahib of
Turangzai. However in 1915, the British
authorities banned his mosque school. Having witnessed the repeated failure of revolts against
the British Raj, Bacha Khan decided that social activism and reform would be
more beneficial for the Pashtuns. This led to the formation of Anjuman-e
Islāh al-Afghān ("Afghan Reform Society") in 1921, and the youth
movement Pax̌tūn Jirga ("Pashtun Assembly") in
1927. After Bacha Khan's return from the Hajj in May
1928, he founded the Pashto
language monthly political journal Pax̌tūn. Finally, in November 1929,
Bacha Khan founded the Khudai Khidmatgar ("Servants of God") movement, whose success
triggered a harsh crackdown by the British Empire against him and his supporters and they suffered some of
the most severe repression of the Indian
independence movement. In 1962, Bacha Khan was named the Amnesty
International Prisoner of
Conscience of the Year. In 1987, he became the
first non-Indian to be awarded Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award. Bacha Khan was an important
freedom fighter, and is a Pashtun national hero and a key figure of Pashtun
nationalism.
Bacha Khan strongly opposed the All-India Muslim
League's demand for the partition of India. When the Indian
National Congress declared its acceptance of the
partition plan without consulting the Khudai Khidmatgar leaders, he felt very
sad and told the Congress "you have thrown us to the wolves." After partition, Bacha Khan pledged allegiance to Pakistan
and demanded an autonomous "Pashtunistan" administrative unit
within the country, but he was frequently arrested by Pakistani government
between 1948 and 1954, and in 1956 for his opposition to the One Unit
scheme under which the government announced to merge the former provinces of West Punjab, Sindh, North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan
into one administrative unit of West Pakistan. Bacha Khan also spent much of the 1960s and 1970s either
in jail or in exile. Upon his death in 1988 in Peshawar
under house arrest, following his will, he was buried in his house at Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of mourners attended his funeral,
marching through the Khyber Pass from Peshawar to Jalalabad, although it was marred by two
bomb explosions killing 15 people. Despite the heavy fighting at the time, both
sides of the Soviet
war in Afghanistan, the communist army and the mujahideen,
declared a ceasefire to allow his burial.
Early
years
Ghaffar Khan was born into a
generally peaceful and prosperous family from Utmanzai in the Peshawar Valley of British India. His father, Bahram Khan, was a land owner in the area
commonly referred to as Hashtnaggar. Ghaffar was the second son of Bahram to
attend the British run Edward's mission school since this was the only fully
functioning school because it was run by missionaries. At school the young
Ghaffar did well in his studies and was inspired by his mentor Reverend Wigram
to see the importance of education in service to the community. In his 10th and
final year of high school he was offered a highly prestigious commission in The
Guides, an elite corp of Pashtun soldiers of the British Raj. Young Ghaffar refused the commission after realising even
Guide officers were still second-class citizens in their own country. He
resumed his intention of University study and Reverend Wigram offered him the
opportunity to follow his brother, Dr. Khan Sahib, to study in London. An alumnus of Aligarh
Muslim University, he eventually received the
permission of his father, Ghaffar's mother wasn't willing to lose another son
to London—and their own culture and religion. So Ghaffar began working on his
father's lands while attempting to discern what more he might do with his life.
Ghaffar
"Badshah" Khan
In response to his inability to
continue his own education, Ghaffar Khan turned to helping others start theirs.
Like many such regions of the world, the strategic importance of the newly
formed North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan) as a buffer for the British Raj from Russian influence was of little benefit to its
residents. The oppression of the British, the repression of the mullahs, and an
ancient culture of violence and vendetta prompted Ghaffar to want to serve and
uplift his fellow men and women by means of education. At 20 years of age,
Ghaffar opened his first school in Utmanzai. It was an instant success and he was soon invited into a
larger circle of progressively minded reformers.
While he faced much opposition and
personal difficulties, Ghaffar Khan worked tirelessly to organize and raise the
consciousness of his fellow Pushtuns. Between 1915 and 1918 he visited 500
villages in all part of the settled districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. It was in
this frenzied activity that he had come to be known as Badshah (Bacha) Khan
(King of Chiefs).
He married his first wife Meharqanda
in 1912; she was a daughter of Yar Mohammad Khan of the Kinankhel clan of the Mohammadzai
tribe of Razzar, a village adjacent to Utmanzai. They had a son in 1913, Abdul
Ghani Khan, who would become a noted artist and poet. Subsequently, they had
another son, Abdul Wali Khan (17 January 1917–), and daughter, Sardaro.
Meharqanda died during the 1918 influenza epidemic. In 1920, Abdul Ghaffar Khan remarried; his new wife,
Nambata, was a cousin of his first wife and the daughter of Sultan Mohammad
Khan of Razzar. She bore him a daughter, Mehar Taj (25 May 1921–29 April 2012), and a son, Abdul Ali Khan (20 August 1922-19 February
1997). Tragically, in 1926 Nambata died early as well from a fall down the
stairs of the apartment they were staying at in Jerusalem.
Khudai
Khidmatgar
In time, Ghaffar Khan's goal came to
be the formulation of a united, independent, secular India. To achieve this
end, he founded the Khudai Khidmatgar ("Servants of God"), commonly known as the
"Red Shirts" (Surkh Posh), during the 1920s.
The Khudai Khidmatgar was
founded on a belief in the power of Gandhi's notion of Satyagraha, a form of active non-violence as captured in an oath. He told its members:
"I am going to give you such a
weapon that the police and the army will not be able to stand against it. It is
the weapon of the Prophet, but you are not aware of it. That weapon is patience
and righteousness. No power on earth can stand against it."
The organization recruited over
100,000 members and became legendary in opposing (and dying at the hands of)
the British-controlled police and army. Through strikes, political organisation
and non-violent opposition, the Khudai Khidmatgar were able to achieve
some success and came to dominate the politics of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. His
brother, Dr. Khan Abdul Jabbar
Khan (known as Dr. Khan Sahib), led the
political wing of the movement, and was the Chief Minister of the province (from the late 1920s until 1947 when his
government was dismissed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League).
Ghaffar
Khan and the Indian National Congress
Ghaffar Khan forged a close,
spiritual, and uninhibited friendship with Mahatma Gandhi, the pioneer of non-violent mass civil disobedience in
India. The two had a deep admiration towards each other and worked together
closely till 1947.
The Khudai Khidmatgar
(servants of god) agitated and worked cohesively with the Indian
National Congress, the leading national organization
fighting for freedom, of which Ghaffar Khan was a senior and respected member.
On several occasions when the Congress seemed to disagree with Gandhi on
policy, Ghaffar Khan remained his staunchest ally. In 1931 the Congress offered
him the presidency of the party, but he refused saying, "I am a simple
soldier and Khudai Khidmatgar, and I only want to serve." He remained a member of the Congress Working Committee for
many years, resigning only in 1939 because of his differences with the Party's
War Policy. He rejoined the Congress Party when the War Policy was revised.
On April 23, 1930, Ghaffar Khan was
arrested during protests arising out of the Salt Satyagraha. A crowd of Khudai Khidmatgar gathered in Peshawar's Kissa
Khwani (Storytellers) Bazaar.
The British ordered troops to open fire with machine guns on the unarmed crowd,
killing an estimated 200–250. The Khudai Khidmatgar members acted in accord with their
training in non-violence under Ghaffar Khan, facing bullets as the troops fired
on them. Two platoons of the The Garhwal Rifles regiment refused to fire on the non-violent crowd. They
were later court-martialled with heavy punishment, including life imprisonment.
Ghaffar Khan was a champion of
women's rights and nonviolence. He became a hero in a society dominated by
violence; notwithstanding his liberal views, his unswerving faith and obvious
bravery led to immense respect. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in his
non-violent methods or in the compatibility of Islam and
nonviolence. He viewed his struggle as a jihad with only
the enemy holding swords. He was closely identified with Gandhi because of his
non-violence principles and he is known in India as the 'Frontier Gandhi'. One of his Congress associates was Pandit
Amir Chand Bombwal of Peshawar.
"O Pathans! Your house has
fallen into ruin. Arise and rebuild it, and remember to what race you
belong." – Ghaffar Khan
The
Partition
Ghaffar Khan strongly opposed the partition of India. While many Pashtuns
(particularly the Red Shirts) were willing to work with Indian politicians,
many other Pashtuns were sympathetic to the idea of a separate homeland for
India's Muslims following the departure of the British. Targeted with being
Anti-Muslim, Ghaffar Khan was attacked in 1946, leading to his hospitalization
in Peshawar.
The Congress party refused
last-ditch compromises to prevent the partition, like the Cabinet Mission plan and Gandhi's suggestion to offer the Prime
Ministership to Jinnah. As a result, Ghaffar Khan and his followers felt a
sense of betrayal by both Pakistan and India. Ghaffar Khan's last words to
Gandhi and his erstwhile allies in the Congress party were: "You have
thrown us to the wolves."
When the referendum over accession
to Pakistan was held, Ghaffar Khan and the Indian National Congress Party boycotted the referendum. As a result, in 1947 the
accession of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa to Pakistan was made possible by a majority. A loya jirga in the Tribal Areas also garnered a similar result as most
preferred to become part of Pakistan. Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgars,
however, chose to boycott the polls along with other nationalistic Pakhtuns.
Some have argued that a segment of the population voted was barred from
voting,.
Arrest
and exile
Main article: Pakistan Movement
Ghaffar Khan took the oath of
allegiance to the new nation of Pakistan on 23 February 1948 at the first
session of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly.
He pledged full support to the
government and attempted to reconcile with the founder of the new state
Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Initial overtures led to a successful meeting in Karachi,
however a follow-up meeting in the Khudai Khidmatgar headquarters never
materialised, allegedly due to the role of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister, Abdul Qayyum Khan who warned Jinnah that Ghaffar Khan was plotting his
assassination.
Following this, Ghaffar Khan formed
Pakistan's first National opposition party, on 8 May 1948, the Pakistan Azad
Party. The party pledged to play the role of constructive opposition and would
be non-communal in its philosophy.
However, suspicions of his
allegiance persisted and under the new Pakistani government, Ghaffar Khan was
placed under house arrest without charge from 1948 till 1954. Released from
prison, he gave a speech again on the floor of the constituent assembly, this
time condemning the massacre of his supporters at Babrra.
"I had to go to prison many a
time in the days of the Britishers. Although we were at loggerheads with them,
yet their treatment was to some extent tolerant and polite. But the treatment
which was meted out to me in this Islamic state of ours was such that I would
not even like to mention it to you."
He was arrested several times
between late 1948 and in 1956 for his opposition to the One Unit
scheme. The government attempted in 1958 to reconcile with him and
offered him a Ministry in the government, after the assassination of his
brother, he however refused. He remained in prison till 1957 only to be re-arrested in
1958 until an illness in 1964 allowed for his release.
In 1962, Abdul Ghaffar Khan was
named an "Amnesty
International Prisoner of the Year".
Amnesty's statement about him said, "His example symbolizes the suffering
of upward of a million people all over the world who are prisoners of
conscience."
In September 1964, the Pakistani
authorities allowed him to go to United Kingdom for treatment. During winter his doctor advised him to go
to United States. He then went into exile to Afghanistan, he returned from
exile in December 1972 to a popular response, following the establishment of
National Awami Party provincial government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.
He was arrested by Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's government at Multan in November 1973 and described
Bhuttos government as "the worst kind of dictatorship".
In 1984, increasingly withdrawing
from politics he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He visited India and participated in the centennial
celebrations of the Indian National Congress in 1985; he was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International
Understanding in 1967 and later Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award, in 1987.
His final major political challenge
was against the Kalabagh dam
project, fearing that the project would damage the Peshawar valley, his
hostility to it would eventually lead to the project being shelved after his
death.
Ghaffar Khan died in Peshawar under
house arrest in 1988 and was buried in his house at Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and over 200,000 mourners attended the
funeral, including the Afghan president Mohammad Najibullah. This was a symbolic move by Ghaffar Khan, as this would
allow his dream of Pashtun unification to live even after his death. The then
Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had gone to Peshawar, to pay his tributes to
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in spite of the fact that General Zia-ul-Haq had tried
to stall his attendance citing security reasons, also the Indian government
declared a five-day period of mourning in his honour.
Although he had been repeatedly
imprisoned and persecuted, tens of thousands of mourners attended his funeral,
described by one commentator as a caravan of peace, carrying a message of
love from Pashtuns east of the Khyber to those on the west, marching through the historic Khyber Pass from Peshawar to Jalalabad. A cease-fire was announced in
the Afghan Civil War to allow the funeral to take place, even though it was
marred by bomb explosions killing 15.
Political
legacy
His third son Khan Abdul Ali Khan was non-political and a distinguished educator, and served
as Vice-Chancellor of University of
Peshawar. Ali Khan was also the head of Aitchison College, Lahore and Fazle Haq college, Mardan.
Mohammed Yahya Education Minister of N W F Province, was the only son in
law of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan.
Asfandyar Wali Khan is the grandson of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, and leader of
the Awami National Party, the party in power in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa till May
2013 elections in which it defeated badly.
Salma Ataullahjan is the great grand niece of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan and a
member of the Senate of Canada.
Abdul Ghaffar Khan's political
legacy is mixed he is renowned amongst Pashtuns, Indians and internationally as
a leader of a non-violent movement. He is credited with his tireless advocacy
of peace in the region he belonged to. However, within Pakistan, there is a
large section of society which still has not come to grips with his siding with
the All India Congress over the Muslim League as well as his opposition to Mr.
M. A. Jinnah who is revered in Pakistan as the father of the nation. In
particular people have questioned Ghaffar Khan's patriotism following his
insistence that he be buried in Afghanistan after his death and not Pakistan.
However, this view is opposed by the fact that he is an ethnic Pashtun, with
there being officially no boundary between ancient northwest India and
Afghanistan, hence being buried in the 'land of Pashtuns' (literal translation
from Old Farsi) is a significant sign of his patriotism towards his ethnic
roots as a Pashtun. Others ask how one's choice of burial place is an
indication of one's Patriotism since a better indicator is one's actions while
living and even though Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan spent half of his 98 year life
in jail most of it in Pakistani jails doing hard labor he continued to reside
in Pakistan.
Film,
literature and society
In 2008, a documentary, titled The Frontier
Gandhi: Badshah Khan, a Torch for Peace,
by filmmaker and writer T.C. McLuhan, premiered in New York. The film received
the 2009 award for Best Documentary Film at the Middle East International Film Festival (see film page).
Ghaffar Khan was listed as one of 26
men who changed the world in a recent children's book published in the United States. He also wrote an autobiography (1969), and has been the
subject of biographies by Eknath Easwaran (see article) and Rajmohan Gandhi (see "References" section, below). His philosophy
of Islamic pacificism was recognised by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a speech to American Muslims.
In the Indian city of Delhi, the
popular Khan Market is named in honour of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and another
market in the Karol Bagh of New Delhi is named after him called Ghaffar Market
Vibhu Puri
is reportedly making a Bollywood Biopic on the life of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
titled Chenab Gandhi.
Peshawar International Airport was
renamed as Bacha Khan International Airport in 2012 due to importance as a major opposition leader from
Pakistan Azad Party and a respect to Pashtun Nationalism by Government of
Pakistan.
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