The Taliban is attacking the legacy of the “Frontier Gandhi”
Bacha Khan University was named after a national hero
By Asher Kohn
The Taliban have claimed responsibility for a school shooting. Gunmen killed 19 students at a university in northwest Pakistan named after Bacha Khan, a pacifist and devout Muslim who collaborated with Gandhi to kick the British out of India. By attacking his namesake, the Taliban seek to destroy the legacy of a revolutionary Muslim.
Not all radicals in this part of the world back their claims with violence. Bacha Khan’s nonviolent resistance won him the nickname “Frontier Gandhi” and the lasting friendship of Mahatma himself. Bacha Khan’s peacefulness also earned him enemies. The Taliban’s predecessors killed 15 during his funeral in January 1988. But the killing of mourners and students cannot mar the name of this remarkable national hero.
Bacha Khan was educated by British missionaries in the northwest frontier of British India. He was offered a scholarship to study in London, but his mother forbade the young man from leaving home, so he opened a madrassah to compete with the British educators. He used the school to launch what he called the Afghan Reform Society in 1921. Preaching a non-violent and socialist Islam, he urged local Pashto-speakers to serve God, not the British. The Servants of God were an army in red shirts, but Bacha Khan stood out from his flock not through dress but sheer size: he was over 6 feet tall and weighed more than 200 pounds.
Bacha Khan and Mahatma Gandhi were were inseparable. The two believed in a united, independent India and spent three decades fighting the British as well as Muslim and Hindu separatists to form a single state from the Hindu Kush mountains to the Bay of Bengal. They were so close that when Bacha Khan’s wife died, Gandhi made a pledge of abstinence. The two would exert all their energies on a free India.
Their dream was only half-realized. The independence came with separate Hindu and Muslim states of India and Pakistan, respectively. (Bangladesh would receive its independence from Pakistan in 1971.) Hindu and Muslim nationalists worked against Bacha Khan’s dream, leaving him feeling as if he’d been “thrown to the wolves.” Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in 1948. Bacha Khan was arrested several times. An increasingly paranoid Pakistani state felt threatened by Bacha Khan’s preaching of tolerance.
Bacha Khan became disenchanted with politics and died peacefully in 1988. Over 200,000 mourners joined his 86-mile funeral march across a British-formed border into Afghanistan. Bacha Khan hoped that his funeral would bring all of the people of South Asia together, but then as now violence forced its way into the conversation. The gentle giant who struggled for peace and unity has left a legacy that the extremists have spent nearly four decades trying to tarnish.
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