Even before Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan met Mahatma Gandhi, he had interacted with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. He is better remembered in India as Frontier Gandhi or Badshah Khan. Despite his roots in normally violent Pashtun tribe, Badshah Khan learnt to lead his warrior community to non-violent methods from the Holy Koran even before he met Gandhi in 1928 for the very first time and got involved in the Indian National Congress Party. Very soon he became Gandhi’s close aide. Despite their different backgrounds, the two men spent many hours together debating politics, religion and cultural issues and laughing together. After the death of his second wife, Khan pledged not to remarry. For his part, Gandhi also vowed to renounce sexual relations, despite his marriage to Kasturba, so as to concentrate fully on politics. Gandhi and Khan shared a vision together that was stronger than everything else. They dreamt of an independent, undivided, secular India – an India where both Hindus and Muslims would live together in peace.
Born on February 6, 1890, in a wealthy family of North West Frontier Province of British India (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan), young Khan was about to leave for studying Engineering in England but his mother did not allow as her elder son was already away in London to pursue Medicine. He applied to join an elite corp of Pashtun soldiers of the British Raj, but refused the commission after realising that even the Guide officers were still second-class citizens in their own country. Later he joined the Aligarh Muslim University. After return from the Hajj pilgrimage at Mecca in May 1929, he founded the Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) movement, whose success triggered a harsh crackdown by the British Empire on him and his supporters. They suffered some of the most severe repression of the Indian independence movement from the British Raj. In 1931, the Congress offered him the presidency of the party, but he refused sayiny: “I am a simple soldier and Khudai Khidmatgar, and I only want to serve.” He continued to be a member of the Congress Working Committee, resigned in 1939 because of his differences with the Party’s war policy. He rejoined the Congress Party when the war policy was revised.
Khan spent more time in prison (37 years) than Nelson Mandela (who spent 27 years in jail), both during the British rule and the subsequent Pakistani governments for demanding equal rights for his people. Nick-named Bacha Khan, he remained opposed to the Jinnah ideology till the very end of his life. Both Gandhi and Frontier Gandhi opposed Partition of British India. Their dreams were shattered when the Partition took place. When his Pathan homeland became a part of Pakistan following the decision conceded by both Congress and Muslim League, he told Gandhi: “You have thrown us to wolves.” After the Partition, Badshah Khan pledged allegiance to Pakistan and demanded an autonomous “Pashtunistan” administrative unit within the country. He and his organisation Khudai Khidmatgar were always branded traitors for following Gandhian methods of non-violence. He was frequently arrested by successive Pakistan governments. Even when he died in 1988, he was under house arrest. Of course, he was buried at his house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as per his will.
Khan was the first foreigner to receive Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian honour by the Government of India, in 1987.
The Mahatma was shot dead by a fanatic Hindu, Nathuram Godse, on January 30, 1948. Forty years after Gandhi’s murder, Badshah Khan died on January 20, 1988, and he was sometimes referred as the Muslim Gandhi. Both Gandhi and Khan were united in the fight for independence against the British rulers. Both fought for freedom and an undivided India. They had a very unusual friendship. Khan popularised Gandhi’s teachings among Muslims. Some times Khan’s demand for “Pashtunistan” was justified by Gandhi which was condemned even by Sir C P Ramaswami Aiyar, the then Diwan of Travancore State. D G Tendulkar, the biographer of Gandhi and Ghaffar Khan, discusses the issue quite extensively in “Abdul Ghaffar Khan: Faith is a Battle”.
Tendulkar quotes Gandhiji: “If when India is free Sir C P declares that Travancore is independent, it means that he intends to enter into conflict with free India….The Pathans did not seek to be independent. They only wanted the freedom to frame their own constitution after the full face of Pakistan and the Indian Union was exposed to view. They did not want to be a third state but only autonomous like any of the other provinces, owing allegiance to the Centre but having no interference in their internal affairs…What Sir C P, however , wanted was a state independent of both the dominions. If this were allowed and the example followed by others, the consequences of it would be that India would be split up into several states….The analogy between Travancore and Frontier Province was again misleading in that Sir C P spoke for the Maharaja, the Frontier leader spoke for the jirga, the people. One was unadulterated autocracy, the other full democracy.”
The saintly leader Ghaffar Khan, who spent almost one-third of his life in jail, expresses agony when he says: “For this independence of the Pathans, we sided with the Congress and we fought our common enemy jointly. We were then called Hindus and Hindu agents.”
P S Ramu in his book “Badshah Khan: Indo-Pakistan Relations” quotes correspondence between Vinoba Bhave, a Gandhian and initiator of Bhoodan movement, and Khan in 1965. Vinoba writes to Khan on April 5, 1965: “I am distressed beyond words to have to admit that in our freedom fight a great injustice had been done to you and you have been practically let down by our friends. But you have borne it all with great patience and fortitude. Your example has been a source of inspiration to all of us.” Badshah Khan was touched by Vinoba’s observations and wrote back on May 5, 1965: “In the last eighteen years, since Pakistan came into being, I have been, as you know, behind bars for fifteen years – mostly in solitary confinement – with taunts and insults from those who were my wardens…..The Government and people of Pakistan label us Hindus whenever we open our mouth or move in the public. I tried to serve the people of Pakistan, but they do not allow me to do so. Because of my past association with the Congress, they do not trust me for anything. We are heading towards a catastrophe.”
Both these great souls deserve to be remembered and tribute be given to them for their selfless contribution.
Next Column: The Benevolent Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad of Baroda
(The writer is a Socio-political Historian. E-mail: [email protected])
