Book Review: Ghaffar Khan-Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns
By Rajmohan Gandhi
Paradox of Pakhtun non-violence
By: Avirook Sen
If the phrase Frontier Gandhi appears in the heading above this review you could assume that my fine colleague who put this page together chose to ignore these opening sentences. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, peacemaker, patriot and Pakhtun, didn’t like the appellation much, says Rajmohan Gandhi. It was the kind of thing “that neither the humility nor the independence in Ghaffar Khan could approve of”. The author uses the phrase just this once in his book (as far as I can recall) and that too to explain why the tag became popular. In August 1934, Ghaffar Khan heard that Gandhi was on one of his fasts and decided to follow suit.
It wasn’t the first time that Ghaffar Khan followed Gandhi’s lead, and it wouldn’t be the last. And if you see it in the context of where Ghaffar Khan came from, you would begin to appreciate the incalculable courage it took him to embrace non-violence.
Between the Hindu Kush to the west and Indus to the east is Pakhtun country. A place where blood feuds have wet the cold dust for centuries. It is an isolated country that demands — and gets — “daring and strength” from its inhabitants. Killings sort problems out in the immediate term. Of course, more problems follow, not to mention more killings. It was this country that Ghaffar Khan tried to liberate — as much from the British (and later from the stranglehold of Pakistan’s Punjabi politicians) as from violence.
Even his own family wasn’t entirely above it. Ghaffar Khan’s elder brother, Dr Khan Sahib, drew a gun (though he didn’t shoot) in order to save Nehru, of all people, in 1946. Ghaffar Khan’s son Ghani, disillusioned with the way Pakhtuns were being treated, raised an armed organisation of his own, in fundamental opposition to his father’s Khudai Khidmatgars.
But from Ghaffar Khan’s vantage, violence was always pointless and sometimes ridiculous — like when he offered a papaya to a fellow prisoner in Hazaribagh jail. The Bihari brahmin “would not cut the papaya with my knife because I was a meat-eater. When I asked him why he was jailed, he replied innocently that he was involved in a murder case”. In sticking so close to Gandhi’s ideology and aligning himself so firmly with the Congress, Ghaffar Khan secured another tag. It was the label he found much harder to live down — the Muslim League called him a ‘Hindu’. And yet, it was the ‘Hindu’ Congress (Nehru and Co. minus Gandhi) who, he would later tell Indira Gandhi, “threw him to the wolves”.
Ghaffar Khan once said that it was better to be slaves under a neighbour than under a perfect stranger. By the end of his life, after 15 years in Pakistani prisons, following 12 years in British ones, and several more years in exile, Ghaffar Khan may have thought it was time to review what he’d said. He did and he didn’t. Gandhi’s book explores this lasting contradiction with as much clarity as you can bring to ambiguity.
He spoke of a “free Pakhtunistan”, yet took care not to mention sovereignty. When Pakistan’s control over the frontier became final with the referendum of 1947, Ghaffar Khan accepted this. In the Pakistan assembly, all he asked for was a “room in the house” for the Pakhtuns. A room bearing a name, just as Punjabis, Sindhis and Bengalis had got. Even that wasn’t to be. After a life divided almost entirely between suffering and betrayal, a lesser man would have become bitter. None of that for Ghaffar Khan. To J.N. Dixit, India’s envoy to Kabul during his final years, he appeared affectionate and pragmatic, though Dixit felt that he was in denial about the fact that his time had passed.
Had it? Has it?
This book makes the case that it hasn’t. And it is an excellent case.