This is a non political post..and the book almost ENTIRELY focuses on the Anti British aspect of the movement. It’s a interesting read:
REVIEW: End of non-violence
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/books/books28.htm
Reviewed by Adil Zareef
The centenary celebrations of the NWFP this year have generated renewed focus on the province’s fateful and arduous journey into contemporary history. The book under review sheds light upon the nationalist independence struggle at the turn of the century and the “Great Game” of the British colonists, suspicious of any liberal and national movement in this sensitive region.
We learn about the genesis of a non-violent social movement in an historically volatile region, the violent retaliation of the colonial power, the rejection of the Khudai Khidmatgars (The Servants of God) by the Congress and the persecution of the KKs and their charismatic leader, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, (also known as Badshah Khan) following the merger of the province into Pakistan.
Ten years ago, when I met the young Bengali anthropologist researching her doctoral thesis for Oxford at Wali Bagh, little did I realize that her efforts would develop into this remarkable ethnographic history. The intellectual origins of her research are the best possible: curiosity aroused by puzzling facts. Discovering an inconsistency between the non-violent civil disobedience of the Pathans against the British from 1930 to 1947 and their reputation as a martial race, with which she, as many others, were familiar, she resolved to research this issue.
The book is the result of careful and thorough archival research and is further enriched by the direct testimony of 75 veterans of the movement, from which it receives its analytical depth. They lamented the impossibility of Badshah Khan’s ideology of non-violence inspiring today’s youth, brought up on cheap consumerism, religious extremism and gun-culture. During her research, she was shocked over the lack of records concerning KK activists, the silence of the history textbooks on the movement and the censorship prohibiting biographies of Badshah Khan until recently.The reason for this, as she found, was the Pakistani state’s concern to propagate its own, selective version of history, in which Jinnah was to be the sole national leader, to the exclusion of other national movements such as the KKs, with their demand for Pathan autonomy. Immediately after Independence, therefore, it clamped down on the movement, persecuting members, destroying records and discrediting it as being pro-Hindu, pro-communist and traitorous.
In her analysis, the author debunks the myth of “Hindu oriented movement”. “The KK movement…while grounded in Pakhtunwali (the code of the Pathans) and Islam, was also an extraordinary bricolage of ideological influences…like Christianity, Gandhist Hinduism, European militarism and even Gandharan Buddhism”.
Compared to other areas of India, the NWFP, on account of its sensitive location near the former Soviet Union, was heavily militarized, oppressively policed, in possession of fewer civil liberties and weighted with a particularly large tax burden, fewer schools and sanitary facilities. A divisive policy was followed as regards the Frontier pathans and those in Afghanistan, and the settled districts and the tribal areas. These contradictions manifested themselves in high levels of intra-Pathan violence, factionalism and diminishing social cooperation. Hence the Pathans were in no position to offer concerted resistance to the British.
These, then, were the ills that Badshah Khan sought to address through the KK movement. By 1930 he had created a social/political movement unprecedented in the history of the frontier in its scope and numerical strength. Members committed themselves to principles of service, sacrifice and non-violence. To counterbalance the traditional aloofness, independence and hot-headedness of the Pathan psychology, they were given disciplinary tasks to instil the qualities of patience, self-sacrifice, humility and cooperation such as cleaning, digging and spinning.
Through a unique combination of authority and charisma, Abdul Ghaffar Khan commanded great respect among the Pathans. Even the impetuous youth were inspired by his personal qualities of austerity, sincerity, love and service. His ideological principles helped bring about the wholesale transformation of Pathan society through both improved social relations and marked reductions in crime.
The question arises: how did Badshah Khan blend his ideas of non-violence with Islam and the traditional Pathan code of Pukhtunwali? Here it is important to mention at the outset that he was not solely inspired by Gandhi, but derived his motivation from the needs and shortcomings of the Pathan society, while drawing upon Congress experience and precise techniques of civil disobedience. That he was a devout Muslim was evident. In addition, he subtly redefined the key terms of Pakhtunwali to reconcile them with the aims of the movement.
The tasks before the KK movement were many and difficult: it had to organize Pathans into a politically united force in the struggle against British colonial rule and link the Pathan movement to the wider body of opposition in India as represented by the National Congress. This involved breaking the traditional barriers of tradition, society and culture.
Moreover, it had to bridge the conceptual and practical gap between parliamentary politics and a popular mass movement. These differences were a constant source of tension surrounding the KK movement, and resurfaced decisively during the events leading up to Partition with the active encouragement of a colonial regime that was at its most manipulative in its governance of the Frontier. Thus the KK civil disobedience campaign between 1930 and 1934, during which they strictly adhered to non-violence, was brutally put down by resort to physical and mental torture.
In the end, the British succeeded in driving a wedge between the KKs and the Congress. Badshah Khan’s social, religious and educational radicalism had already antagonized most of the Muslim leadership. The Congress party had dominated a 92 percent Muslim majority province for 20 years, winning a clear electoral victory in 1946 on a manifesto that urged a non-partitioned India. There was a coincidence of interests between the British and the Muslim League, for whom the very existence of KKs was anathema to the concept of an Islamic nationhood. The Muslim League won a controversial referendum barely a year later, which took the province into Pakistan.
Thus, while the overall outcome was not what it had hoped for, the KK movement played a key role in ensuring, through non-violence, that the course of events in the Frontier did not decline from an intense political drama into an out and out bloodbath. Indeed, this book comes as a timely reminder that today’s culture of violence and unscrupulous politics would do well to take a leaf from Bacha Khan’s book of high moral principles.
The Pathan unarmed: opposition and memory in the Khudai Khidmatgar movement
By Mukulika Banerjee
Oxford University Press, 5 Bangalore Town, Sharae Faisal, Karachi-75350.
Tel: 021-4529025
Email: [email protected]
ISBN 0195793889.
320pp. Rs595