Context
20 January marks the death anniversary of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a.k.a. Bacha Khan and the Frontier Gandhi, another Gandhian giant whose politics rose above communalism and was singularly focussed against British imperialism’s purloining of India.
About
- Khan was born on 6 February 1890, two and a half months after Jawaharlal Nehru, in the village of Utmanzai, what is now a small town near Peshawar in today’s Pakistan, then British India.
- He was a Pakhtun or Pathan from the North West Frontier Province, now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where people are said to still subscribe to the code of revenge.
- Yet Frontier Gandhi, as Ghaffar Khan was popularly known, led a non-violent movement against the British in the province, his followers refusing to retaliate even as they were mowed down.
- Ghaffar Khan embraced the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence because it resonated with Islam, thereby negating the idea that the religion of Muslims was inherently violent.
- He opposed the brand of homogenising political Islam, represented by Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League in much the same way as Hindutva represents political Hinduism today.
- That is why he stood with the Congress in its battle against the Muslim League and communalism.
- Khan was opposed to the Partition and was frequently jailed or exiled by the Pakistan Government for opposing its policies in the 1960s and 1970s.
- The Indian Government awarded Khan the Bharat Ratna in 1987.
- He died a year later on January 20, 1988.
