Rajmohan Gandhi - Ghaffar Khan: Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns

Fifty years ago or thereabouts, Badshah Khan of the Peshawar valley was, for most people of the subcontinent and for the British who had recently vacated it, the Pathan, or, to use preferred contemporary (and rather more accurate) expressions, the Pakhtun or Pashtun.

In the 1940s and the 1950stimes that surrounded freedoms pain-filled glorythe word Pathan never failed to conjure up the image of this man coming from a region that classical India knew as Gandhara, an immensely tall figure with an absolutely straight back, a great nose, kindly eyes, and a permanent aura of nonviolent defiance. Exercising an undeniable right, a subsequent generation in Pakistan, India, and elsewhere chose, however, to forget him.

This process was aided by turbulence in Afghanistan, which always affects the Pathans of the Frontier. In the 1970s the Afghans, regarded by Badshah Khan as his kin, turned, as they had often done in their history, to infighting and a coup. Then began an absorbing sequence of occupation by the Soviet Union, resistance to that occupation, liberation, civil wars, and Taliban rule. It was not easy, during this long phase, to retain a focus on Badshah Khans life. Even though he had lived until 1988, by when the end of Soviet occupation was a matter only of time, his leadership of the Pathans struggle against the British and his post-1947 striving for Pakhtun dignity seemed distant achievements, unconnected with what was happening in Afghanistan and, as a result, in the NWFP, which harboured thousands of Afghan mujahedin and hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees.

But 9/11 recalled Badshah Khan to the public mind, and not on the subcontinent alone. The New York Times wrote (on 7 December 2001, in an Op-Ed piece by Karl E. Meyer) about The Peacemaker of the Pashtun Past, who not so long ago symbolized peace and tolerance and seemed an antithesis of a later Pashtun, Mullah Omar of Kandahar (a place frequently but erroneously confused with Gandhara), the fanatical Taliban leader, foe of the USA, and Osama bin Ladens host in Afghanistan.

Yet Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khanaka Badshah Khan, Bacha Khan, Baba, Khan Sahib, and the Frontier Gandhilived for more than peace and tolerance; he lived also for justice. Which is how he became a political prisoner for about twelve years under the British, and for an additional fifteen years after the founding of Pakistan, into which his Peshawar valley and the rest of the North-West Frontier Province had been merged. However, the contrast with Mullah Omar is dramatic enough, from a variety of angles.

One, the struggle for which Badshah Khan mobilized his fellow Pathans was nonviolent.

Two, in him a passion to find an answer to the code of revenge to which Pathans appeared to be sworn seemed to equal a passion for independence from foreign rule. To this Muslim, forgiveness was part of Islam.

Three, non-Muslims seemed as important as Muslims to Badshah Khan, who said that he and his Pathans would protect the Hindus, Sikhs and Christians living in the overwhelmingly Muslim North-West Frontier Province. One man who had touched his life was a white Christian schoolmaster called Wigram; another was a Hindu called Mohandas Gandhi.

Four, Badshah Khan wanted Pashtun women to study, work and lead; in 1932 he sent his daughter Mehr Taj, who had just entered her teens, to study in England.