SMILING IN SPITE of the stifling heat, Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, great-grandson of Queen Victoria and viceroy of the Indian empire, sat on a raised dais overlooking the crowded Karachi assembly hall. He did not wish to rush matters. For the past six months he had had too little time to do anything else. As India’s last viceroy, he had been granted the full plenipotentiary powers of a head of state by the Attlee government in London, and had arrived in New Delhi with fourteen months to disengage the British Raj from India. He had already managed it in less than six.

Now, with independence only hours away, Mountbatten would proclaim to the packed hall of the Pakistani assembly His Majesty King George VI’s good wishes for the fledgling republic. He seemed determined to give the moment its proper polish. Yet despite his apparently unhurried calm, Mountbatten was still walking a tight wire. He was presiding over the tormented birth of not one country but tow: Pakistan had been carved away from the rest of India in the tow separate corners of the subcontinent where Muslims predominated over Hindus.

It had been three and a half centuries, almost to the year, since the British came to India; it had been tow centuries since they established military control. From the beginning the Indian people had chapped with increasing bitterness under the British yoke, and the parts of the country that had been longest under colonial rule had histories of rebellion and reprisal. Then, in the last thirty years, Mahatma Gandhi had captured the Indian imagination with an unprecedented challenge: to make the British “quit India” and to see them depart as friends. It was the only nonviolent overthrow of an attention of the world on this day.
Tall, turbaned Punjabis in the colorful assembly milled with the khans and chieftains of the wild tribes of the south. Baluchis, Sindis, and Pathans checkered the room. In the hall were almost all the prominent Muslim leaders- Liaquat Ali Khan, Khwaja Nazimuddin, Iskander Mirza, and, at the viceroy’s side, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, soon to become governor-general of the world’s first Islamic republic.

Yet one prominent Muslim was absent. Abdul Ghaffar Khan had baffled the British and electrified Indians by raising an army of one hundred thousand nonviolent soldiers out of one of the world’s most violent peoples, the Pathans. The villagers of his North-West-Frontier Province revered him as a saint and called him Badshah Khan, the “King of Khans.” Throughout India he was known as the Frontier Gandhi because he, of all Gandhi’s followers, best mirrored the fullness of Gandhi’s way.

To Mountbatten, it must have seemed ironic that the man who had done more than any other Pakistani Muslim to fuel the freedom struggle should be absent at its consummation. Under the circumstances, however, the viceroy would not have been surprised. Khan, a devout Muslim, had opposed partitioning India to create a separate Muslim state.
Mountbatten nodded to the stately Jinnah and stood up. The chattering crowd stilled to listen to the king-emperor’s message of good will.

Only hours later Mountbatten was aboard his Royal Air Force York on its way to New Delhi. There, at midnight, the ceremony of independence would be repeated. Across the night air the low, thin wail of a conch shell proclaimed the birth of the Indian Republic. They cry that had roused India’s millions to revolution and freedom built to a roar over the city: Mahatma Gandhi ki jai! Victory to Mahatma Gandhi!

Yet Gandhi was five hundred miles away. Declining to attend the ceremony-India’s partition had been too high a price to pay for freedom-he had spent the eve of independence in prayer and fasting.

And while Gandhi fasted in Calcutta, the “Frontier Gandhi” was finishing his evening prayers near his home village in Pakistan. His palms lifted to the pale sky, Badshah Khan turned toward Mecca and chanted verses from the sacred Koran, as uncounted millions had chanted them before him. Their deep, slow music stirred the air: Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim…”In the name of God, most compassionate, most merciful…”

Khan raised himself from the small prayer carpet. Looking out across the sprawling Peshawar valley to the scarred hills and ridges of the Khyber, he scarcely heard the tumult of celebration building in his village. Freedom for him would be measured by how quickly the lot of the desperately backward Pathans in hundreds of villages spotting the valley and low hills would improve. Ignorant and provincial, most Pathans still lived in poverty and fear. Badal, the obligation of revenge ran deep in their blood and almost daily stained the social netting with violence between brothers, rivals, families, and clans- and in defending their homelands against the British invaders. Pathan lives, and history, were awash in blood.

To have to carry destruction, if not destitution, into the homes of some hundreds of families is the great drawback of border warfare, but with savage tribes, to whom there is no right but might, the only course open as regards humanity as well as policy, is to make all suffer.
If objection be taken to the nature of punishment inflicted as repugnant to civilization, the answer is that savages cannot be met and checked by civilized warfare, and that to spare their houses and crops would be to leave them unpunished and therefore, unrestrained. In short, civilized warfare is inapplicable.

Sir Neville Chamberlain was commander of the Punjab Frontier Force when he sent this dispatch to London during a punitive campaign against the Pathans in 1859. The words distill the attitude that most British held ever since. Less than civilized, subhuman, the Pathan was a “savage,” a “brute,” “cruel as a leopard,” a “treacherous murderer.” Khan’s people commanded the attention-and the wrath- of the British Empire solely because they happened to inhabit the mountains around the strategic source of wealth in the Empire. The British were determined to hold it at any cost-and the Pathans, for whom independence was everything and warfare a way of life, were equally determined to win their freedom.

The Pathans had carried the stamp of fear and hatred ever since the bone- chilling January morning in 1842 when the sole English survivor of the forty-five hundred-man “Army of the Indus” rode into Fort Jalalabad. The eighty-odd years of guerrilla warfare that followed hardened these feelings into an article of faith. The British sent scores of expeditions into the Pathans’s hills, shelled their strongholds, burned (and later bombed) their villages, beat, flogged, and jailed Pathans by the thousands. In between, in times that passed for peaceful, they tried to bribe them into submission. But nothing worked for long. The Pathan homeland remained the only part of the British Empire never to be safe to say, no Englishman slept a night in a Frontier town or village-or even within an army cantonment- without the lurking menace of a bullet crashing form a distant lookout or the sudden, silent descent of a razor-sharp dagger.

The British counted on only one certitude on the Frontier: that the peace would break, and that British columns would once again across the earth’s five continents, the North-West Frontier Province was called simply “the Grim.”

But it would not be the Pathans’ sharp shooting or cunning or violent heroics that would finally drive the British from the Frontier. No amount of sniping or suicidal assaults could match the weaponry and will the Empire had at its command. Only a historical mutation, a reversal of the rules themselves, could finally thwart the imperial will and send the British home.

It was left to Gandhi to supply the innovation-nonviolent warfare-and to Badshah Khan to provide the surprise. History played a great trick upon the empire builders of the Raj when it brought forth from the heart of “the Grim” a man who combined Pathan fire with the tempering spirit of a dove. It was utterly improbable. No one could have anticipated that such a phenomenon-a Muslim St. Francis-would emerge from the seething Pathan badlands. That it did, and that it burst into a broad and mighty force, stands as one of history’s most extraordinary-and most neglected-moments.

Khan’s backward tribesmen turned the tables on the British. These same maligned Pathans stirred the whole Indian subcontinent when they put down their daggers and handmade rifles and faced, without retaliating, the worst the armies of a baffled, panicking empire could deal out.

It was severe in the extreme. In 1930, at the height of the Indian nonviolence movement, a British report less polished than Sir Neville Chamberlain’s but more candid would conclude: “The brutes must be ruled brutally and by brutes.” In British eyes, Khan’s nonviolence was nothing more than a camouflage. A nonviolent Pathan was an impostor; they had seen too many of the Empire’s finest cut down on too many nameless crags to think otherwise. Gandhi’s nonviolence was one thing: a bitter nuisance, perhaps, but consistent at least with the image of the peaceable Hindu. A nonviolent Pathan was unthinkable, a fraud that masked something cunning and darkly treacherous.

During the Indian freedom struggle, therefore, khan and his nonviolent army found themselves the target of savage repression. On occasion the entire province was even sealed off from the eyes of the world, leaving government forces a free hand to crush the movement in whatever way they could. The impression that the British were fair and easygoing opponents in India is based largely upon the ignorance in which the treatment of Khan and his people has been shrouded. Throughout the thirties and early forties, Pathans had to endure mass shootings, torture, the destruction of their fields and homes, jail, flogging, and humiliations. Khan himself spent fifteen years in British prisons, often in solitary confinement: in effect, in jail one day for every day that he was free. But the Pathans remained nonviolent and stood unmoved-suffering and dying in large numbers to win their freedom.

Even Indians, themselves engaged in the same nonviolent struggle, were astonished. Jawarlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, found it incredible that “the man who loved his gun better than his child or brother, who valued life cheaply and cared nothing for dearth, who avenged the slightest insult with the thrust of a dagger, had suddenly become the bravest and most enduring of India’s soldiers.” In one of history’s more improbable turnabouts, it was left to Khan’s ragged tribesmen to explode the myth that nonviolence works only for those who are already peaceful.

Gandhi had long claimed that nonviolence was more truly the province of the daring and the undaunted: and surely no people on the face of the earth were more daring or dauntless than the Pathans. Even the average tribesman prefers death t dishonor. But no even Gandhi would have predicted that the evidence to back up his claims would come from these swaggering sharpshooters. He knew the odds against such a miracle: “That such men,” he said, “who would have killed human being with no more thought that they would kill a sheep or a hen should at the bidding of one man have laid down their arms and accepted nonviolence as the superior weapon sounds almost like a fairy tale.”

Gandhi, a truth-loving man, was never nearer the truth. Like many such tales, the story of Abdul Ghaffar Khan has hidden within it the seeds of a deeper truth, of which our explosive, tottering world stands much in need. It is time the tale was told.