KHAN ABDULGHAFFAR KHAN, 1890----1888

No true effort is in vain. Look at the fields over there. The grain sown therein has to remain in the earth for a certain time, then it sprouts, and in due time yields hundreds of its kind. The same is the case with every effort in a good cause.

BADSHAH KHAN WITH KHUDAI KHIDMATGARS
History’s First Nonviolent Army

MAULANA ABUL KALAM AZAD AND KHAN ABDUL GHAFFAR KHAN
Maulana Azad was the first leader of Muslim politics to ally himself with India’s freedom movement against the British Crown. His newspaper, Al-Hilal, inspired Khan in 1928 to start his own journal, Pushtun, to encourage the development of Pathan culture.

WANDERING FROM VILLAGE TO VILLAGE
Khan’s love and service of his people made him the ruler in “the undisputed kingdom of their hearts,” according to Mahatma Gandhi. “There is no humbug about him. He is an utter stranger to affectation.”

VILLAGE ROOTS OF FRONTIER NONVIOLENCE
With a genius for organization, Khan set up a network of committees called jirgahs modeled after the traditional tribal council that have maintained Pathan law for centuries.

WITH LEADERS OF THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT
Khan was banned from the North-West-Frontier-Province in 1934, allowing him to spend time with Gandhi sat his community in Central India. Here he met many key figures of the freedom movement, such as Jawaharlal Nehru (speaking left) and Jamnalal Bajaj,

CHARGED WITH SEDITION
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (second from left) and Bhulabhai J. Desai (middle) confer with Khan over his courtroom defense on charges of sedition against the Crown in 1934

A GIFT FROM GANDHI
Awaiting a visit from Mahatma Gandhi, Khan accepts a gift from him – a goat sent ahead by his secretary, Mahadev Desai (in vest at right)

MAHATMA GANDHI AND BADSHAH KHAN
The “two Gandhis” talk during Gandhi’s tour of the North Frontier Province in 1938, when Kan invited him to study and guide the Khudai Khidmatgars movement.

AT EDWARD’S COLLEGE
Gandhi bristled early in his Frontier tour in a speech at Edward’s College, when his nonviolence was described as “passive resistance” as he was being introduced. “Passive resistance is a negative thing and has nothing of the active principle of love,” Gandhi said. “Satygraha proceeds on the active principle of love which says, ‘Love those that despitefully use you.’…I find it difficult in spite of my conscious practice of it for the last fifty years.

KHAN SHARES A HONEYCOMB WITH GANDHI
Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan held almost identical views on many problems of the day; they reacted in the same way to similar situations, and they enjoyed each other immensely. The ideal of nonviolence was a great bond between them, but they also shared a love of nature, a childlike laugh, and an affinity with the poor. Both craved periods of silence and possessed a deep sense of spirituality.

MEETIN THE KHUDAI KHIDMATGARS
Gandhi stopped at dozens of villages in the month he toured the frontier. “As Badshah Khan believes in my nonviolence, he wanted me to be as long as I could among the Khudai Khidmatgars,” said Gandhi in meeting the “Servants of God.” “For me, I needed no temptation to go to them. I was myself anxious to make their acquaintance. I wanted to reach their hearts.”

KHAN AND GANDHI IN THE LAND OF THE WARRIOR TRIBES
“People laugh at me for believing the Khudai Khidmatgars could become full-fledged nonviolent soldiers,” said Gandhi, “but their mockery does not affect me. Nonviolence is a quality not of the body, but of the soul. Human nature in the Khudai Khidmatgars in not different from mine.”

VISITING AN ANCIENT BUDDHIST MONASTERY
The ruins of Taxila were the last stop on Gandhi’s Frontier tour. “Our land has been witness to various cultures,” Khan told Gandhi. “At one time this land was the cradle of Aryan civilization. Later it saw the flowering of Buddhism under which we made rapid progress.” Long- forgotten ancestors of the Khudai Khidmatgars had meditated on the Buddha’s injunction, “Hatred does not cease by hatred; hatred on ceases by love. This is an unalterable law.” Antagonisms of the day were an aberration of the Frontier’s history, Khan said.

LESSONS IN SPINNING
BadshahKhan hosts Jawaharlal Nehru.

GANDHI AND KHAN RELAX BETWEEN ACTIVITIES

KHAN SUPPORT GANDHI WHEN CONGRESS BREAKS WITH HIS LEADERSHIP
In a sing of greater separations to come, the Indian National Congress stated in 1940. It was “unable to go the full length with Gandhiji.” The Working Committee voted to defend India with weapons rather than with nonviolence should aggression reach its borders during World War II. Front row, from left to right: Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Azad. Second row, behind Gandhi: Khan Abdul Ghafar Khan next to Sarojini Naidu

BIHAR RIOTS, 1947
Comforting victims; bringing people together.

BIHAR RIOTS, 1947
Congress worker Mridulabehn Sarabai, followed by Khan, Gandhi, and Gandhi’s niece Manu.

RETURN TO DELHI: FINAL ENCOUNTERS
One of the last photographs of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan with Mahatma Gandhi as they arrive in New Delhi in June 1947, just as Congress takes a formal vote to partition the country.

DURING THE FRONTIER REFERENDUM
Badshah Khan reads of Sir Olaf Caroe’s decision to resign as governor of the Frontier Province during the referendum on partition.

AMONG HIS FAMILY
Khan was having a meal with his son in a nearby village when he heard of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. They could not finish eating. They held a condolence meeting of the Khudai khidmatgars. “He was the only ray of light to help us through these darkest days,” said a grieved Badshah Khan.

Working with the tribal councils
Though his mentor was gone, Khan continued his campaign for nonviolence. He told his people the Frontier Province could demonstrate to the world the constructive power that is released in returning love for hatred. Perhaps, he said, one day the frontier could serve as a “golden bridge” to bring Indian and Pakistan together.

PAKISTAN CONSTITUTION ASSEMBLY
In February 1948, Khan took the oath of allegiance to the new nation of Pakistan. Though he had opposed partition, he accepted the division and said all should move forward for the good of the country. He hoped ultimately to sway Pakistani opinion in support of the Khudai Khidmatgars so that they could continue as a service organization. Four months later, only six months after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, Khan was sentenced to six years in prison. During his imprisonment many Khudai Khidmatgars were killed, and the organization was banned.

RELEASED FROM PRISON
Abdul Samad-Khan Atsakzai, the leader of the Pathans in Baluchistan, Badshah Khan, and Khan’s brother, Dr. Khan Saheb, were released from prison in January 1954. Pakistan had declared a state of emergency and imposed a government without a vote of the people. Badshah Khan tried to revive the Khudai Khidmatgar movement to fight for representative government. In 1956, he was arrested and imprisoned again and his property was confiscated. In 1957, Amnesty international voted him prisoner of the year, saying, “His example symbolizes the suffering of upward of a million people all over the world who are in prison for their conscience.” Khan had been incarcerated for most of the ten years that India and Pakistan had been free.

RENEWED ATTENTION ON BADSHAH KHAN
For years Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had been trying without success to find some way to support Khan. In the mid-1960, Nehru encouraged Gandhi’s secretary, Pyarelal, to write a book about khan to draw attention to his plight, and his last assignment to the prominent India historian D. G. Tendulkar was to write a detailed biography of Khan along the lines of his epic biography of Mahatma Gandhi. Above is a singed photo that Khan sent Tendulkar. Nehru hoped somehow that renewed attention would help Khan in his human right struggle. When Nehru died in 1964, Badshah Khan lost his foremost champion in India. A few months later, Khan left Pakistan for about six years of self-imposed exile in Afghanistan.

INDIA’S VICE PRESEDENT PAYS A VISIT TO KHAN
Dr. Zakir Hussain and Badshah Khan had shared time in prison before freedom. Above is their reunion after nineteen years during Khan’s exile in 1966.
“Now that the door has opened, we will not let you alone for long.”

KHAN ARRIVES IN INDIA FOR GANDHI CENTENNIAL
In 1969, only week away from his eightieth birthday, Badshah Khan was a special guest of India for the centennial of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth. Hearing that India was again torn by communal riots, Khan appealed for an end to the violence. Newspaper described Khan as “pulling no punches and speaking with touching sincerity reminiscent of his mentor.” The riots had been cloaked as Hindu-Muslim differences, but Khan said the violence had little to do with religion. The truth of the matter, he said, was that selfish people exploited communal differences for economic and political gain.

FAST FOR AN END TO VIOLENCE
Just one day after his arrival in India for the centennial, Badshah Khan announced a three-day fast for an end to violence. It was his first fast since the seven-day fast he had observed for the same reason in 1947 in sympathy with Mahatma Gandhi. Khan’s action electrified India and the blood shed stopped. “I have considered myself a part of you and you a part of me,” he told his former countrymen. “I have come to see for myself if I can be of some use.”

CAMPAIGNING FOR HUMAN RIGHTS AT AGE NINETY-FIVE
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was placed under house arrest at a government “sub jail” at age ninety-five after protesting military rule in Pakistan.

Even when Badshah Khan was in Bombay for treatment during his final illness in his late nineties, Prime Minister Gandhi recalled, “the fight was in him” still. Khan had no concerns for himself, the prime minister said. Instead he worried about building spiritual and moral character for the future, emphasizing that nonviolence was the only effective defense for the world. In his last message to the public from his sickbed, Khan asked reporters, “Why are they producing weapons of mass destruction? Gandiji worked for nonviolence.”