Ghaffar Khan, Khan Abdul

Abdul Ghaffar Khan, (born 1890, Utmanzai, India—died Jan. 20, 1988, Peshawar, Pak.), the foremost 20th-century leader of the Pashtuns (Pakhtuns, or Pathans; a Muslim ethnic group of Pakistan and Afghanistan), who became a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and was called the “Frontier Gandhi.”

Ghaffar Khan met Gandhi and entered politics in 1919 during agitation over the Rowlatt Acts, which allowed the internment of political dissidents without trial. In the following year he joined the Khilafat movement, which sought to strengthen the spiritual ties of Indian Muslims to the Turkish sultan, and in 1921 he was elected president of a district Khilafat committee in his native North-West Frontier Province.

Soon after attending an Indian National Congress (Congress Party) gathering in 1929, Ghaffar Khan founded the Red Shirt movement (Khudai Khitmatgar) among the Pashtuns. It espoused nonviolent nationalist agitation in support of Indian independence and sought to awaken the Pashtuns’ political consciousness. By the late 1930s Ghaffar Khan had become a member of Gandhi’s inner circle of advisers, and the Khudai Khitmatgar actively aided the Congress Party cause up to the partition of India in 1947.

Ghaffar Khan, who had opposed the partition, chose to live in Pakistan, where he continued to fight for the rights of the Pashtun minority and for an autonomous Pushtunistan (also called Pakhtunistan or Pathanistan; an independent state in the border areas of West Pakistan). He paid dearly for his principles, spending many years in jail and afterward residing in Afghanistan. Ghaffar Khan returned to Pakistan in 1972. His memoirs, My Life and Struggle, were made public in 1969.