by Amitabh Pal
It’s tragic that India and Pakistan are almost constantly in a state of animosity and are now facing off against each other with nuclear weapons. It’s also ironic, since both countries can claim pacifist pioneers. India has Gandhi, as most everyone knows. But few people know about Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a proponent of nonviolence and social change who lived in Pakistan.
Khan resided in what is now the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, and he was affectionately known as the “Frontier Gandhi.” As Gandhi was given the title of Mahatma, meaning “Great Soul,” Khan was given the title Badshah, meaning “Leader” or “King.”
A devout practitioner of nonviolence and social reform, Khan worked to spread his ideals in the region. Eluding at least two assassination attempts and surviving three decades in prison, he remained committed to nonviolence to the day he died in 1988 at the age of ninety-eight.
“For today’s children and the world, my thoughts are that only if they accept nonviolence can they escape destruction, with all this talk of the atom bomb, and live a life of peace,” Khan told an interviewer in 1985. “If this doesn’t happen, then the world will be in ruins.”
Asfandiyar Wali Khan, Ghaffar’s grandson, remembers two basic lessons his grandfather gave him about the superiority of nonviolence.
“He said that violence needs less courage than nonviolence,” says Asfandiyar, who resides in Peshawar, Pakistan. “Second, violence will always breed hatred. Nonviolence breeds love.”
As a young man, Ghaffar Khan started a school for Pashtun children. Soon, he came under the influence of Haji Abdul Wahid Sahib, a social reformer. Before long, he had established contact with other progressive Muslim leaders in India, who urged him to work for the education and uplift of the Pashtuns. But Ghaffar Khan was still searching for answers. In 1914, he performed a fast that lasted for days. The fast strengthened his resolve to dedicate his life to social reform, and he spent the next few years touring the region. Soon he learned about Gandhi and his movement, which provided an enormous boost to Khan and his work.
Khan founded a nonviolent movement in 1929 called the Khudai Khidmatgar–the servants of God. This movement, which eventually involved more than 100,000 Pashtuns, was dedicated to social reform and to ending the rule of the British in then-undivided India.
Khan’s calls for social change, more equitable land distribution, and religious harmony threatened some religious leaders and big landlords. But he toured incessantly, traveling twenty-five miles in a day, going from village to village, speaking about social reform and having his movement members stage dramas depicting the value of nonviolence.
“I visited a really remote village recently and was taking pride in the fact that I was the first outsider to be there,” says Asfandiyar, the central president of the Awami (People’s) National Party, which claims to carry on Ghaffar Khan’s work. “However, I learned that Badshah Khan had been there in 1942. Imagine the conditions at the time. He must have had to walk ten to twelve hours to get there.”
The British treated Ghaffar Khan and his movement with a barbarity that they did not often inflict on other adherents of nonviolence in India. “The brutes must be ruled brutally and by brutes,” stated a 1930 British report on the Pashtuns.
The British thought of Ghaffar Khan’s movement as a ruse. To them, “A nonviolent Pathan [another name for a Pashtun] was unthinkable, a fraud that masked something cunning and darkly treacherous,” writes Eknath Easwaran in Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan, A Man to Match His Mountains (Nilgiri Press, 1999).
The British thus reacted with a singular ferocity to the Khidmatgar desire for independence from British rule, subjecting Khidmatgar members throughout the 1930s and early 1940s to mass killings, torture, and destruction of their homes and fields. Khan himself spent fifteen of these years in prison, often in solitary confinement. But these Pashtuns refused to give up their adherence to nonviolence even in the face of such severe repression.
In the single worst incident, the British killed at least 200 Khidmatgar members in Peshawar on April 23, 1930. Gene Sharp, who has written a study of nonviolent resistance, describes the scene on that day: “When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, those behind came forward with their breasts bared and exposed themselves to the fire, so much so that some people got as many as twenty-one bullet wounds in their bodies, and all the people stood their ground without getting into a panic. . . . The Anglo-Indian paper of Lahore, which represents the official view, itself wrote to the effect that the people came forward one after another to face the firing and when they fell wounded they were dragged back and others came forward to be shot at. This state of things continued from 11 till 5 o’clock in the evening. When the number of corpses became too many, the ambulance cars of the government took them away.”
The carnage stopped only because a regiment of Indian soldiers finally refused to continue firing on the unarmed protesters, an impertinence for which they were severely punished.
With his commitment to Hindu-Muslim unity, Ghaffar Khan was firmly opposed to the creation of Pakistan, which was founded as a homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. He also thought that the rights of the Pashtuns would be better respected in a large, decentralized, united India rather than in a smaller, more centralized Pakistan. After Pakistan’s creation, he started demanding a separate region, or Pashtunistan, for the Pashtuns. He left it deliberately ambiguous whether he wanted this area to be within Pakistan or a separate country.
All this gave the Pakistani authorities the opportunity to accuse him of anti-national activities. They jailed and killed some of his followers. Khan was imprisoned again for more than a decade. The Pakistan government banned the Khidmatgar movement and razed its headquarters, but Khan continued his work…