Daily Times

The recent attack at Bacha Khan University, arguably motivated by a variety of reasons, is indicative of an ideology that seeks to terrorise by targeting education and the youth. It raises alarming questions over the role of security in schools, the militarisation of the public sphere and, more importantly, how to overcome this assault against learning.

However, the selection of this specific university as a site of attack, at a time when a poetry competition commemorating Bacha Khan’s death anniversary was being held, is also symptomatic of how his legacy still remains deeply problematic for us. The university, recently established in 2012, was part of the previous ANP government’s project of establishing and renaming places after Bacha Khan and the movement he led: the Khudai Khidmatgars.

Starting out as a social reform movement for Pakhtuns, the Khudai Khidmatgars were deeply influenced by Gandhi’s theory of peaceful non-cooperation. Their main emphasis was on preventing violence and blood feuds, especially over property, in the province. Starting in the 1930s their stance also became increasingly anti-colonial, and they became the formal North West Frontier Province (NWFP) branch of the Indian National Congress, holding an electoral majority in NWFP for a large part of the last decade before partition, even though the Muslim League had made significant inroads into Frontier politics by the early 1940s.

Unlike the Muslim League, which argued for the Muslims as forming a separate nation, Bacha Khan was wary of the role of religion in government and social leadership. He saw no need to insure safeguards for Muslims in what was already a Muslim majority province, and envisioned the future of NWFP within an Indian state, with substantial autonomy for regional units. Bacha Khan’s vision and his role as a member of Congress have made him a tricky figure for nationalist histories in Pakistan. It raises the central question of how to approach intellectuals and leaders who were critical of the project of Pakistan. Sadly, in Bacha Khan’s case, the approach has been one of erasure or maligning.

The ANP’s project of honouring the Khudai Khidmatgars and trying to recover their role in Pakistan’s history made little headway in changing the nationalist narrative of the Islamic Republic, which is deeply ingrained in our collective psyche. Such accounts glorify the Muslim League, while relegating other figures – especially those fighting for regional autonomy – to oblivion, or branding them as ‘traitors of Pakistan’. This historical amnesia, or worse the ‘friends of Nehru and Gandhi’ label that accompanies figures such as Bacha Khan, needs to be addressed. It is quite telling that much of the definitive scholarship on Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgars is published across the border, invariably feeding into the ‘traitor’ and ‘foreign hand’ narrative.

Although Pakistani historians have also led the charge in writing histories that take aspirational regional politics seriously, their attempts are often thwarted by educational institutions seeking to maintain the primacy of the centralising state and its twin pillars, the ideology of Pakistan and the Two Nation Theory. Unsurprisingly, the paper that reportedly led to Sayed Wiqar Ali Shah’s removal as the director of the National Institute for Historical and Cultural Research (NIHCR) at Quaid-e-Azam University included an explicit call for exploring the history of opposition parties in the earlier periods of Pakistan’s history such as the one formed by Bacha Khan, Abdul Samad Achakzai and G M Khan in 1948.

The politics of opposition to the Muslim League following partition were also marked by violence and coercion, and is easily glossed over in conventional histories. Starting with Jinnah’s summary, and arguably undemocratic, dismissal of Khan Sahib’s (Bacha Khan’s elder brother) NWFP ministry in 1948, the Khudai Khidmatgars were systemically targeted. In August 1948, police opened fire on a gathering of Khudai Khidmatgars in Charsadda, killing 15 to 600 people (reports vary widely). Soon after, leading figures of the Khudai Khidmatgars were arrested for unlawful organisation and Bacha Khan spent the next six years under house arrest and in jail.

Bacha Khan’s agenda in post-1947 Pakistan was one aimed at regional autonomy and included a reform programme for Pakhtuns. However, he was accused of sedition and conspiring to declare an independent state of Pakhtunistan. To some extent, the spectre of Pakhtunistan as an organised, separatist movement was employed by the provincial NWFP government to its own advantage, creating a sense of emergency and enabling the use of force against perceived dissent.

Bacha Khan spent the rest of his life mostly in opposition to centralising forces that sought to erase cultural difference and delegitimise calls for regional autonomy, finally breathing his last under house arrest in 1988. He was buried in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and on the day of his burial a ceasefire was declared in the Afghan-Soviet war, allowing mourners to travel.

Plagued by detractors who saw him as aligned with Indian Congress leaders, Bacha Khan’s leadership of the Khudai Khidmatgars, his role in anti-colonial politics and opposition to the authoritarianism of the post-colonial state have largely been relegated to oblivion. Little wonder then that the figure of Bacha Khan in nationalist histories is either erased or is transformed into one of a traitor in cahoots with the Hindu Congress leadership – an ideal target for TTP terror.

The author is a freelance columnist