Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

Every religion that has come into the world has brought the message of love and brotherhood. Those who are indifferent to the welfare of their fellow men, whose hearts are empty of love, they do not know the meaning of religion.

—Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

He would tower over the diminutive Mahatma Gandhi and bend courteously to talk to him. In this six-foot-six gentle giant, a Pathan from that fierce land of guns and blood feuds, Gandhi found a true man of peace. Like the Mahatma, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan believed in non-violence and tolerance of all religions, and his only purpose in life was to help his people. And they returned his love by calling him ‘Badshah Khan’—the King of the Khans.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan did not know the exact date of his birth but it was probably in 1890. He was born into the family of a Pashtun (Pathan) chieftain Behram Khan of the Mohammedzai tribe, in the village of Utmanzai in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). This region, bordering Afghanistan and set high among the western Himalayas, was a poor and backward one. The people survived by primitive agriculture, education was just basic religious lessons at the local madrassa and women, living cloistered in purdah, had no rights at all.

When young Ghaffar Khan was sent to the madrassa to study, he realized that all he was expected to do was memorize the Quran, but the Mullas would not explain the text. As he wrote later, ‘… the Mullas were not aware of the true meaning of religion and very often they insisted that children should not ask any question but should merely devote themselves to learning by rote and recitation.’ He soon shifted to the Edwards Memorial Mission High School to receive a modern education.

For a short while he joined the army but soon resigned, angered by the way Indians were treated by British officers. His family was not pleased, because among the Pashtuns, a commission in the army was considered a matter of supreme good fortune. Ghaffar Khan left for Aligarh for further studies and here he was exposed to modern thinking and the latest events in the nationalist movement. He met many scholars and social reformers, and began to read progressive newspapers like Maulana Azad’s Al-Hilal. As the son of an affluent family he could have remained a scholar, but he took on the challenging task of transforming Pashtun society.

Ghaffar Khan understood early in life that the progress of his people depended on a modern education and opened his first school when he was just twenty. In a deeply conservative society, suspicious of change, he brought the promise of progress and freedom. Over the years he travelled across the region talking to people about the value of education and how it would benefit their lives. He was always a champion of women’s rights and opened schools for both boys and girls. Soon his activities caught the attention of the government and the Mullas, and neither was pleased. It was in the government’s interest to keep a martial race like the Pashtuns in a state of backwardness and poverty, and the Mullas who felt threatened by any form of progress preferred to support the government.

In the 1920s Ghaffar Khan organized demonstrations in support of the Khilafat movement—a largely religious movement aimed at preserving Islamic tenets—and was arrested. He was in various prisons for three years and even here he worked among the prisoners. The wardens, suspicious of his popularity, often kept him in chains in solitary confinement and this affected his health. When he came out of prison he went back to his work of trying to make his people turn away from their preoccupation with violence and vendetta. A devout Muslim who respected all faiths and opposed all forms of religious fanaticism, he tried to make them understand the true meaning of Islam that talks of peace and solidarity among the faithful. He lived a simple, Spartan life and his thoughts and actions very often resembled those of a man he deeply admired—Mahatma Gandhi.

In 1929 Ghaffar Khan formed an organization called Khudai Khidmatgar or the Servants of God. These non-violent revolutionaries also came to be called the Red Shirts because of their uniform. He launched a newspaper Pakhtun in the Pushto language to spread his message. He also began to talk of his dream of an independent land for his people. He met Gandhi and other Congress leaders in 1928 at Lucknow. He had earlier met the leaders of the Muslim League, who were mostly rich landowners, and he was not impressed. He felt that the League was being promoted by the British to divide the nationalist movement.

In the Congress, and especially in Gandhi, he found the values that he cherished—of religious tolerance, non-violence and social reform. He often stayed with Gandhi at his ashram at Wardha and he responded immediately to Gandhi’s call for Satyagraha and said that it was ‘the weapon of patience and righteousness … No power on earth can stand against it.’ He joined the Congress and his party began to attend its annual sessions, where the red shirts of the Khudai Khidmatgar always added a splash of colour to the sea of khadi.

During the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 one of the most effective protests was held in NWFP where for nearly a week the government lost control of Peshawar. The demonstrations were always peaceful and it was here that the soldiers of a Garhwali regiment refused to fire on a peaceful and unarmed crowd. Ghaffar Khan was arrested again and sentenced to three years in jail. Here he taught the Quran to the Hindus and the Bhagavad Gita to the Muslims to show how the message of all religions was the same. He had also discovered the therapeutic value of spinning on a charkha; he said it focused the mind. After the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, which secured the release of all political prisoners except those convicted for violence, all the leaders were released from prison except Ghaffar Khan. Gandhi had to personally intervene with Lord Irwin to have his comrade freed.

Ghaffar Khan became a member of the Congress Working Committee but refused the post of president when it was offered to him in 1931. In the 1937 elections to provincial governments, the Khudai Khidmatgar party won the majority of seats in NWFP, proving that the Muslim League did not represent the Muslims there. The government tried to impose its own man as chief minister but failed and Ghaffar Khan’s elder brother Dr Khan Saheb became the head of the government.

During the final negotiations with the Cabinet Mission, Ghaffar Khan was a member of the Congress team with Maulana Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel. However, his dream of an independent Pashtun nation was shattered when NWFP was included in Pakistan. The Muslim League called him anti-Muslim and in 1946 he was attacked and hurt so badly that he had to be hospitalized. When a plebiscite was held in NWFP in 1947, his party boycotted it and only seven per cent of the people voted, but the Muslim League declared the election valid. This betrayal of the Pashtun cause is one of the forgotten tragedies of the independence movement.

After 1947 Ghaffar Khan faced many years of house arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the Pakistan government, but he was never reconciled to the reality of Pakistan and said, ‘Pakistan was created by the grace of the British, in order that Muslims and Hindus might forever forget that they are brothers.’ His final years were spent in exile in Afghanistan. On 21 January 1988 Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan died at Jalalabad at the age of ninety-eight. The man of the mountains, who was called ‘Frontier Gandhi’ for his courageous non-violence, fought for his people till the end.