Abdul Ghaffar Khan was one of the greatest practitioners of nonviolent resistance and humanitarians of the 20th century but few people have heard of him—even those from the part of the world where he lived and worked and strived for peace, independence, and the dignity of the people. He has been called the ‘Frontier Gandhi’. In Afghanistan he was known as Badshah Khan.
Ghaffar Khan was born in 1890 near Peshawar during the period India was under British domination. There was no Pakistan at the time and he lived in what later became known as the North-West Frontier Province. His early schooling took place at a nearby mosque where he became more and more frustrated that his teachers seemed not to comprehend the nature of religion and emphasized memorisation over understanding.
After finishing school, the young Ghaffar Khan, upset by the lack of education and rate of illiteracy among his fellow Pashtuns, opened a school to teach children. He would later found two newspapers, one in NWFP and one in Afghanistan.
In 1919 he was introduced to Gandhiji during protests against the Rawlett Act. Having found brother of sorts, Ghaffar Khan would later become part of Gandhiji’s inner circle. A result of the action over the act was one of many imprisonments he was subjected to during his long life. But he was resolute in his ideas and determined to act on his beliefs and convictions.
In the 1920s, he joined Congress Party which expanded its influence to his home area of NWFP. His entrance into politics put him into the movement for the independence of India. In 1921, he was arrested again for spreading nationalistic ideas. He was kept, bound, in solitary confinement. He was released in 1924.
In 1929, he helped found the Khudai Khidmatgar movement, which eventually had numbers estimated as high as 100,000.
Ghaffar Khan was offered the presidency of the Congress Party but declined, saying that “I am a simple soldier and Khudai Khidmatgar, and I only want to serve”. And he continued to serve.
In 1946 to 1947, riots and violence broke out, leading up to independence and the ‘partition’ of India. Gandhiji and the party accepted the separation of Pakistan from India. This greatly saddened Ghaffar Khan, as he felt the best course would be a united secular India. It went against his hopes for the equality of man. He also felt that the rights of all would be better protected under a unified nation.
In the years following the partition he did what he could to continue seeking equality and social reform-when he wasn’t being imprisoned. Pakistan expelled him in 1958. He went to Afghanistan and did not return until the early 1970s. As he got older, travel became more difficult.
He was honoured with Jwaharlal Nehru International Award for Peace in 1980. In 1987 he was conferred Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award of India.
After 1986, he was mostly in hospital, dying two years later on January 20, 1988 at the age of 98. Of those 98 years, about half were spent in jail or forced exile. He was buried in Afghanistan per his wishes.
