Pashtoon Peacenik

But his legacy does survive, surely, to show us that things need not be as they are now. Rajmohan Gandhi points out that the British officials didn’t believe the Pashtoons would ever take to non-violence, but they did accept Ghaffar Khan and his teaching. In the crucial 1946 election, they voted for him. This biography should also remind us to look behind the present situation of the Pashtoons of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Rajmohan Gandhi points out that British officials were in no small measure responsible for the spread of the communal propaganda that undermined Ghaffar Khan’s position, and if we look at more recent history we will see the hand of America and its allies in the rise of Wahabite Islam and the spread of terrorism in the NWFP and Afghanistan. If Gen Zia had listened to Wali Khan, the Frontier Gandhi’s son, and kept out of the war between America and Russia in Afghanistan, if American arms and men who didn’t believe in Ghaffar Khan’s non-violent Islam had not poured into NWFP, who’s to say what the situation there would be?

This commendable, concise, and readable biography is a reminder of what non-violence could still do in NWFP if outsiders don’t intervene and Pashtoon politicians and religious leaders seek peace for their people. If non-violence could succeed in NWFP, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t succeed in other strife-torn parts of the world too. Maybe it will too. Perhaps Ghaffar Khan was a man before his times, and a man whose time has now come.

If the aftermath of military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq has not taught the human race that even the most powerful military nation the world’s ever known can’t control the outcome of war, that violence breeds violence, then surely we are all caught up in some global madness. Wise men of all faiths are at last realising that claiming a monopoly of wisdom, claiming they follow the only way to God, leads to violence which defames religion. The only way for religions to live in harmony is to acknowledge, along with Ghaffar Khan, that all prayer is ultimately addressed to the same god. In many parts of the world women have already achieved their rightful status and where they haven’t voices like Ghaffar Khan’s are being raised. Nearer home, Ghaffar Khan stood for the whole of South Asia, not just for India, Pakistan, or indeed his own Pashtoon home. May we not now be seeing the dawn of reason in Delhi and Islamabad, the dawn which will lead to the daylight of peace and friendship after the long night of bitterness and hatred?

Ghaffar Khan’s funeral showed the potential of his legacy. Even Korejo, one of his Pakistani critics, was moved to say, "The caravan of cars, trucks and other vehicles carrying his followers, friends and admirers was endless. A sea of humanity greeted them in Jalalabad. This was, so to say, a caravan of peace."