Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a Pashtun independence leader who built one of the largest nonviolent movements in colonial India. Born in 1890 in Utmanzai in the North-West Frontier Province, he came from a landowning Mohmand family and was educated at a mission school in Peshawar before turning to social reform among his fellow Pashtuns.

In 1929 he founded the Khudai Khidmatgar, the Servants of God, a movement of red-shirted volunteers pledged to nonviolence. The organisation ran schools, opposed blood feuds, and confronted British rule unarmed. Its discipline under fire, especially during the 1930 Qissa Khwani Bazaar massacre in Peshawar, won the admiration of Mahatma Gandhi, who became a close ally and gave Ghaffar Khan the affectionate name Frontier Gandhi.

He spent more than thirty years of his life in prison, first under the British and then under successive Pakistani governments after Partition, which he opposed because it cut his Pashtun homeland in two. He pushed instead for an autonomous Pashtunistan and was repeatedly jailed for his stand. In 1987 India awarded him the Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian honour, the first non-citizen to receive it.

Ghaffar Khan died in 1988 in Peshawar and, by his wish, was buried in Jalalabad in Afghanistan. Soviet and Afghan forces observed a ceasefire so mourners could cross the border for his funeral. He remains a touchstone for nonviolent activism in South Asia.

His given names combine the Arabic Abd al-Ghaffar, servant of the Forgiver, one of the names of God in Islam, with the Turkic title Khan. He bore them as masculine names traditional among Pashtuns and other Muslim communities.