In 30 Seconds
Story
Of all the movement’s improbabilities, none confounded the empire’s categories like the army that rose on its most violent frontier sworn never to strike a blow. The Khudai Khidmatgars, the Servants of God, the red shirted volunteer host that Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan raised among the Pathans of the North West Frontier Province from 1929, took the people the Raj’s manuals classed as the most warlike of the martial races and made of them the freedom struggle’s most disciplined nonviolent soldiers, and the government’s response, the harshest repression visited on any wing of the national movement, measured how much more it feared the Pathan’s patience than his rifle.
Ghaffar Khan had come to the work through a generation of quieter labour. Born in 1890 at Utmanzai in the Peshawar valley, son of a prosperous and notably unvengeful khan, he had declined a Guides commission after watching a Pathan officer humiliated, declined Aligarh’s path for village work, and given his twenties and thirties to the cause he never abandoned, schools. The Azad madrassas he founded from 1910 onward taught Pashto literacy and trades against the mullahs’ suspicion and the government’s active hostility, for the Frontier was governed as a garrison, excluded from every reform, ruled under the Frontier Crimes Regulation’s collective punishments, and an educated Pathan was, in the administration’s candid files, a security problem. Jail seasoned him, three years in fetters after the 1919 disturbances, and the reformist journal Pakhtun, the women’s emancipation he preached decades ahead of his region, and the tours village by village built the following that in November 1929 he organised as the Khudai Khidmatgars, volunteers sworn by oath to serve humanity, to refrain from violence and from revenge, the uniform dyed brick red, the army complete with drill, ranks and flags, and its weapon, its founder taught, the Prophet’s own patience, nonviolence preached by Badshah Khan, the king of khans as the people crowned him, not as tactic but as Islam.
The Frontier’s hour came with the Civil Disobedience spring of 1930. Ghaffar Khan was arrested on 23 April as the campaign opened, and Peshawar answered with the gathering in the Qissa Khwani bazaar, the storytellers’ street, where troops and armoured cars met an unarmed crowd and the firing, prolonged and repeated as the people, in the testimony that stunned the subsequent inquiries, came forward to receive the bullets rather than disperse, killed by official count a score and some and by the national movement’s count hundreds. In the same days the empire received a shock it buried deeper, two platoons of the Garhwal Rifles, Hindu soldiers ordered against the Muslim crowd, refused to fire, their court martial sentences of transportation and years of imprisonment advertising to every barrack what the government most dreaded. The province rose, the Khidmatgars’ enrolment multiplying toward eighty thousand, and the repression that followed, gunfire at Takkar and Hathikhel, mass floggings, the red shirts stripped, humiliated, their fields ruined, was reported by the movement’s chroniclers and half admitted in the files as exceeding anything visited on any other province, the Raj’s certainty that a Pathan movement must at bottom be violent licensing what a nonviolent one endured.
The movement’s politics sealed its double offence. Ghaffar Khan, spurned by the Muslim League’s notables and embraced by Gandhi, took the Khidmatgars into alliance with the Congress in 1931, the Frontier Gandhi, as India named him, becoming the Mahatma’s closest companion of the later struggles, and the province the League claimed by arithmetic voted Congress by conviction, the Khidmatgar ministries of Dr Khan Sahib, his brother, governing the Frontier through the decade the next chapters tell. The end was heartbreak, the referendum of 1947 boycotted, the brothers’ plea against partition unheard, Badshah Khan telling the Congress it had thrown them to the wolves, and the new Pakistan jailing the old man longer than the Raj had, fifteen years of its first thirty, the movement banned, Utmanzai’s veterans persecuted. He died in 1988, mourned by a ceasefire in a war zone as his cortege crossed the Khyber to Jalalabad, and the army he raised remains history’s standing answer, from the unlikeliest ground on earth, to the doctrine that nonviolence is the weapon of the weak.
