Chapter 11
The Frontier Gandhi
I have but one standard of measure and that is the measure of one’s
surrender to God.
A SIMPLE BUT passionate faith in God underlies every aspect of the
Pathan’s life. As with all devout Muslims, his day is fixed by the
five movements of prayer. He stops, bows low towards Mecca, and
prays. He looks to the village priest for guidance; hence the mullah
is usually the true power center of a tribe. Though the Pathans’
battles are carried out by warriors, they are inspired by
priests-Mullah Mastun, Churchill’s “Made Fakir,” being just one
example.
Lacking theology, the Pathan seeks spirituality in the lives of the
truly devout. The Pathan hills are spotted with shrines and tombs of
holy pirs and fakirs. In a sense these are the real power centers,
for no tribe is without at least one tomb-shrine of a great saint.
Upon these rock clusters, lodged often on an almost inaccessible
crag, the Pathan takes his most solemn oaths.
The government banned meetings within four miles of any road, and
had khan followed day and night by British intelligence officers.
Often he was the target of distortions in the British press. “Holly
war threat in India started by Abdul-Ghaffar Khan,” accused the
Daily Express- a classic British fear to play on, for Mullah Mastun
had not been the only fiery priest to arise in the Muslim corners of
the Empire. The Daily Mail was predictably even more colorful. It
called the Frontier “an outpost of the Soviet Republic,” claimed it
was “the spearhead of an attack on India,” and spoke of “Russian
gold pouring in across the Khyber Pass” and “Muslims being armed
with the Russian weapons.” “Their leader,” it concluded, “is the
terrible Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a jailbird and relentless enemy of the
British.”
Since December 25th, the chief activity of the Red Shirts has been
to send the volunteers for picketing from the villages to Peshawar.
The police take down the name and addresses of these picketers,
which are always-it is their rule-faithfully given. Then a column of
troops goes out by night to raid the village from which the
picketers come.
“That is hard to say,” was the reply. “We shall do everything we
can, even to the giving of our lives, but to bear this zulum
[tyranny] without retaliation is indeed hard.”
Much to his discomfort, Khan quickly found himself cast as a saint.
After his return to the Frontier in March 1931, following the
Gandhi-Irwin truce, Khan found himself besieged by villagers who
believed that his touch could heal. When he dug a well, the water
was emptied-wasn’t it holy? Moreover, in the rest of India, Khan’s
pure faith and austere ways had made him known as the Frontier
Gandhi.
He did not like it. “Do not add the name of Gandhi to my name,” he
told an audience of students. “I am not fit for the praise you have
showered on me. The praise is due to the nonviolent method, which
has changed the nature of our people.” Playing the curmudgeon, Khan
told the Pathan villagers in plain words that their hard work was a
hundred time more pleasing to him than their veneration. Nor did he
like this “Badshah”-he was a servant of the people, not their king.
But all this was no use. The Badshah could say what he liked; these
people knew a true saint when they saw one.
His action did not help to dispel the notion, either. He had given
up eating meat and – unheard-of for Pathan-stopped drinking tea. He
ate little and wore homespun clothes. And shortly he would make the
supreme sacrifice for a Pathan: renounce his land, turning owner
ship over to his three sons. A Pathan without land loses his right
to vote the jirgah and thus, in a sense, no longer counts as a
Pathan: he is literally a fakir, landless. The Pathans were
uneducated, but eve the simplest could recognize this austere,
self-effacing, and landless khan for what he was: a spiritual lamp.
Khan’s touring of the villages was almost incessant now, and lined
with difficulties. Twice he was nearly assassinated. Resistance rose
up not only from the British and the mullahs but from wealthy khans
who saw reforms as a threat to their interests. The British
carefully protected the privileges of such people, using them as
levers against popular unrest. Khan found himself in a triple
cross-fire. Illiteracy was so high among the villagers that only
constant personal contact could keep them inspired and committed.
Khan tried to visit every village in the province. Carrying only a
bundle of extra clothing and a few other necessities, he often
covered as much as twenty-five miles a day, stopping at three or
four villages and speaking for an hour at each one. Sometimes he and
his volunteers staged drams that instructed the villagers in
nonviolence.
When he reached the last village of the day, his first task was to
go to the mosque-often just a low room of undressed rock and
mortar-and sweep it clean. He especially liked to stay with the
village poor. With a child or two draped across his shoulders he
would chat with the tribesmen, exhorting them to be cleaner,
stronger, more loving. In the derahs at night, in the mosque during
the day, Khan never let up. “There are two objects in view,” he
repeated everywhere, “to liberate the country and to feed the
starving and clothe the naked.”
Khan’s sister addressed meeting throughout the Frontier. With
Gandhi’s example before him, Khan had begun to waken Pathan women,
and almost overnight they stepped from the medieval world behind the
evil to open leadership. Khan loved it. “My sisters,” he told a
large gathering at Bhaizai,
I am feeling a peculiar sort of pleasure, because where I went in
India and saw the nationwide awakening of the Hindu and Parsi women,
I would say to my self, “Would such a time come when our Pathan
women would also awaken?....” I had cherished this longing ever
since. Thank God, today, I see my desire being fulfilled.
God makes no distinction between men and women. If someone can
surpass another, it is only through good deeds and morals. If you
study history, you will see that there were many scholars and poets
amongst women. It is a grave mistake we have made in degrading
women…
If achieve success and liberate the motherland, we solemnly promise
you that you will get your rights. In the Holly Koran, you have an
equal share with men. You are today oppressed because we men have
ignored the commands of God and the Prophet
(Sallallahu-Alehe-Wasallam). Today we are the followers of custom
and we oppress you. But thank God that we have realized that our
gain and loss, progress and downfall, are common.
The British wanted Khan’s touring stopped. The Frontier Government
informed the viceroy that they intended to arrest Khan unless he
quit. Gandhi protested that Khan’s arrest would snap the truce, and
asked to visit the Frontier himself to study the government’s
complaints. He was refused, but his son Devadas was allowed in and
reported that the Frontier government was alarmed only because Khan
was continuing to rouse the politically dormant Pathans. “At the end
of my six day’s wanderings,” Devadas wrote, I have realized more
than ever before the power and inspiration of the personality of
Khan Saheb [i.e., Abdul Ghaffar]. The one central and unquestionable
fact that emerges was…that Khan Saheb himself is held in great
esteem by all, not excluding the critics of the Red Shirt movement.
Large numbers of Pathans have come under the influence of Khan
Saheb, whose personality seems to act like magic among them. He
gives himself no rest. He moves about from place to place and mixes
freely among the villagers, living exactly as they do.
The simplicity of his character, and the deep sympathy he evinces
for the poor and the oppressed, have created for him an abiding
place in the hearts of the people.
In spite of the calumnies and obstruction, however, Khan refused to
stop touring. The village of Rustam had been placed under a
prohibitory order, Section 144 of the Criminal Code, which forbade
public gatherings. Khan urged the villagers to defy the order which,
he felt, was a breach of the truce. “Do not fear death,” he told
them.
Section 144 is your test. If you cannot oppose this order, how can
you come out to the battlefield? Pay no attention to the order. Be
ready and come out to the nonviolent battlefield.
Nonviolent war means a kind of war your ancestors fought fourteen
hundred years ago. Show the people you are their descendents…
Rule yourselves, and as long as you live, do not submit to the rule
of anybody else. Be prepared and free yourselves from this
oppressive rule. If you perish on the battlefield, what does it
matter? Everyone must die.
Tension on the Frontier mounted. On December 22, 1931, the chief
commissioner of the Frontier, Sir Ralph Griffith, invited Khan to
attend a reception. Khan refused. As long as the government was
suppressing the Khudai Khidmatgars, he could not socialize with it.
Griffith was undeterred. He had a policeman bring Khan to him. “I am
a plain man,” khan told the commissioner. “I like a straight talk.
Don’t try to be diplomatic with me.”
“Politics,” the commissioner answered, “is a chess game with moves
and countermoves. I checkmate you and you checkmate me-if you can.”
“Then I am not the man for you,” Khan answered, and rose to leave.
“Wait,” the commissioner replied, seeing his error. “Look at all
those people out there.” He waved his hands towards the waiting room
benches, lined with khans and villagers. “They wait for an interview
with me for days together-but even then I don’t meet with them. Yet
in spite of my repeated requests to meet you, you don’t want to
oblige me.”
Khan laughed. He liked this candor. “Those people all want something
from you,” he said, taking his seat again. “I don’t want anything.
Why should I tire myself out waiting?”
Sir Ralph’s big fist banged the desk in front of him. “An
unfortunate government it is from which the honest people keep away
and which surrounds itself with the dishonest. It is destined to be
doomed!”
Khan and the chief commissioner discussed their differences. Like
Gandhi, Khan spoke plainly. If “half the money spent in ruination
and the killing of tribesmen” were used to develop cottage
industries and schools, he said, the British would have no need to
be afraid of the Pathans; they would be their lifelong friends. And
as far as protecting India from Soviet invasion went, the best way
for the British to achieve that was to allow the Pathans to be
masters in their own land. “No one can dominate us,” he said flatly.
“If anyone thinks of waging a war against us, we are willing to
sacrifice everything for the protection of our country.”
When Khan rose to go, Sir Ralph expressed the hope that they would
meet again. Khan could not resist a parting gesture. “Surely,” he
said, heading toward the door. “But you will have to send another
policeman for me.”
At their best, whatever charges might be leveled against them, the
chief administrators of the Frontier knew whom to respect. The
courage and candor of these Pathan tribesmen won their sincere
admiration. But it did not stop them from discharging their imperial
duties. Sir Ralph Griffith bid goodbye to Khan, left for Delhi and a
visit to the viceroy, and returned on December 24 to have Khan
arrested. Dr. Khan Saheb and Ghaffar Khan’s sons, Wali, Ghani, and
Ali, were arrested too. Within two weeks, in fact, every major
political leader in India would be in prison.
The truce was over. On Christmas Day, 1931, six columns of British
troops occupied Peshawar. Thing would be different this time; their
would be no “half-measures” as before. A new, tougher viceroy had
replaced the accommodating Irwin, with instructions from London to
give no quarter. On the Frontier, the order went out: crush the Red
Shirts.
Gandhi was arrested around midnight on January 4, 1932. One of his
parting instructions was to ask an Englishman, Verrier Elwin, to get
into the Frontier and supply the rest of India with reliable
information on what was happening there. Elvin managed to cross the
border and quickly dispatched a grim twenty-page report:
The column normally arrives in about three on the morning. The
village is surrounded. The leading men are ordered to produce Red
Shirts. If they refuse, they are severely beaten. If any Red Shirts
are found, they are arrested, beaten, and their uniforms removed and
burnt.
The local Khudai Khidmatgar office is burnt to the ground. Police
raid the houses and take whatever they can. No one knows if he is
safe.
The authorities mistook Elwin for a trader, so he was able to spend
a week in the Frontier interviewing both Indians and British. He had
no trouble confirming, from the mouths of British soldiers
themselves, the worst of the rumors that had been reaching India.
What had changed things was the truce itself. Hardened career
officers and soldiers of the Frontier had been waiting to even the
score. The breakdown in the truce gave them their chance. “This Red
Shirt business must be smashed,” one official told Elwin, “and we
are determined to do it.” Elwin was told of mass firings on crowds,
beatings, public floggings, wholesale confiscation of property, and
the sacking of whole villages to recover fines. “The soldiers
collect money as if they were Moguls,” one policeman gloated.
Thirty-five hundred people had been arrested in Peshawar alone. By
the time Elwin reached the city, on January 11, there was not a Red
Shirt to be seen. Government officials spoke openly and without
compunction. “This is the Frontier,” one of them told Elwin. “You
‘down-country’ people [in the rest of India] don’t understand.”
Elwin replied that even “down-country” people understood that
inhumanity is inhumanity.
In a small village “under the great hills of the north” Elwin talked
with the tribesmen, “splendid men with finely molded features and
kind eyes.”
“What is going to happen? I asked.
“But will violence help you?”
“Certainly not.”
“Do you then believe in nonviolence?”
“With all our hearts.”
What can account for such impassioned commitment to nonviolence on
the part of these uneducated, provincial villagers? An overwhelming
love for their Badshah, surely; they he was giving his life for
them. And the sheer challenge of it must have appealed to the Pathan
bravado. But for so many to stand so much without khan’s constant
inspiration-he was usually in jail-these rough Pathan villagers must
also have grasped something at the very heart of nonviolence: that
it works. “To gain independence,” Khan once explained,
Two types of movement were launched in our province…
The violent movement [the uprising before 1919] created hatred in
the heads of the people against violence. But the nonviolent
movement won love, affection and sympathy of the people… if a
Britisher was killed [during the violent uprising] not only the
culprit was punished, but the whole village and entire region
suffered for it. The people held the violence and its doer
responsible for repression. In the nonviolent movement we courted
self-suffering…Thus, it won love and sympathy of the people.
True to Gandhi’s insistence on scrupulous accuracy in his reports,
Elwin was careful to inquire whether the Red Shirts themselves had
resorted to violence. There were instances, he found, through often
not involving Khudai Khidmatgars but other aroused village Pathans.
Policemen had been insulted, spat at by children, and occasionally
attacked with stones. “But even so,” Elwin wrote, “instances of this
kind are rare and cannot possibly be use to justify the policy of
terrorization on which the authorities have embarked”-a chilling
litany of systematic beatings, torture, and reprisals.
Elwin heard varied accounts of Khan. “He is an old rascal,” one
official remarked. “He’s no good; he can’t shoot,” said an Afridi
tribesman. “He is a Christ,” said a British woman who had lived with
his family.
Elwin wrote for an interview with Commissioner Griffith to hear the
government’s point of view. Griffith responded by having Elwin
arrested and sent out of the province on the first available train.
Elwin concluded that the government had succeeded in creating a kind
of peace, but it was the “peace of the dead. It has managed to make
life unpleasant for a large number of our brothers and sisters in
the north; but it has no crushed their spirit and in will never do
so.”
Khan was removed from the Frontier Province and placed in solitary
confinement in a prison in Bihar, in north eastern India. He was
denied newspapers and letters and was not allowed contact with
anyone. Other prisoners could not even cross the footpath in front
of his cell.
In April 1934 Gandhi suspended the civil disobedience movement,
which had lost its momentum, and threw himself and his co-workers
into the uplift of village India to ready the nation for the final
drive to freedom. Most political prisoners were released, but not
Khan. His; physical condition continued to deteriorate. Finally,
after a visit from an understanding official, he was given a cell
mate: Dr. Khan Saheb was transported to Bihar to stay with his
brother. Badshah Khan never was sentenced; the government simply
held him, at its pleasure, for three years. But at least it gave the
brothers a chance to be together. |
|
|
