Rajmohan Gandhi
July 4, 2005
On visits to Muslim-majority nations and in interactions with Muslim citizens elsewhere, I am often surprised at a lack of knowledge about real Muslim heroes.
One such was Abdul Ghaffar Khan of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), better known as Badshah or Bacha Khan, who died in 1988 in Peshawar, at the age of 98. This Pashtun opponent of British imperialism and Pakistani authoritarianism spent a total of 27 years in prison, 12 during British rule and 15 after independence.
One of his greatest achievements was to create the Khudai Khidmatgars, or the Serving Volunteers of God, a nonviolent army that for 50 years delivered the message of autonomy, unity, equality and self-reliance to the Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns of the NWFP.
A devout Sunni Muslim who also cherished the pre-Islamic past of his land and proudly took guests to the Bamiyan Buddhas, Badshah Khan sent a son and, more significantly, a daughter to study in the West in 1931. Also, he was a close friend and political associate of my grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi. Thrice in the late 1930s he hosted Gandhi in the NWFP, and it is a remark that Gandhi made there in October 1938 that I would like to present in regard to Palestine/Israel today.
