He was 6 feet 4 inches tall. The charismatic Khan Abdul Khaffar Khan (also known as Badshah Khan) was one of India’s valiant freedom fighters against the British Empire. He and his older brother, Dr. Khan Sahib, worked very closely with the leaders of the All India Congress Party until the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947. Badshah Khan, the unquestioned and beloved leader of the Pashtuns in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of India was also a devout and devoted follower of Mahatma Gandhi. He made his turbulent and quarrelsome people accept peaceful and nonviolent methods of political action, involving enormous personal suffering. So in the ’30s and ’40s, during India’s struggle against the British regime, Badshah Khan was known as the Frontier Gandhi all over the subcontinent.

“That such men,” Gandhi said, “who would have killed a human being with no more thought than they would kill a sheep or a hen should at the bidding of one man have laid down their arms and accepted nonviolence as the superior weapon sounds almost like a fairy tale.” For Gandhi, the true test of nonviolence is in the domain of the bold and the brave and the undaunted. So the average Pashtun who prefers death to dishonor is the ideal one who could show the world that the technique of nonviolence really works.

The referendum at the time of the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 showed that NWFP should go to the newly formed Islamic Pakistan. Badshah Khan, a true believer in secularism, boycotted the referendum whose result was a foregone conclusion. He was no doubt distraught but he never felt abandoned by his allies in India. His older brother, Dr. Khan Sahib was the chief minister of NWFP at that time. One week after independence, his government was disbanded. Both the brothers had always maintained very cordial relations with India.

The government of Pakistan kept them repeatedly under house arrest for several years in spite of protests from India and their properties were confiscated. For a brief period Dr. Khan Sahib was in the central cabinet of Pakistan in 1954 shortly before the military took over the government and he was assassinated in 1957. Badshah Khan languished in Pakistani prisons for several years. He visited India in 1969 as one of the speakers of the Gandhi birthday centenary celebrations and again in 1985 for a celebration by the Indian National Congress Party. During his last visit to India (in 1987 at the age of 97), he was awarded the title of Bharata Ratna by the Government of India – the first non-Indian recipient of India’s highest award. Next year, at 6:35 a.m. Jan. 20, he passed away peacefully at Lady Hardinge Hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan. He was cremated in the garden of his home in Jalalabad in Afghanistan.

Whether the people of Pakistan or Afghanistan consider him a hero or not, to the millions of people in India, Badshah Khan is one of their founding fathers who led the country and made it into a modern democratic secular multiethnic republic.

Badshah Khan wrote in 1983: “The world needs Gandhi’s message of peace and love and nonviolence today than it ever did before, if it does not want to wipe out civilization and humanity itself from the earth’s surface. On anther occasion, a few years earlier, he said: as a young boy I had violent tendencies; the hot blood of the Pashtuns was in my veins. But in jail I had nothing to do except read the Koran. I read about the Prophet Mohammed in Mecca, about his patience, his suffering his dedication. I had read it all before, as a child, but now I read it in the light of what I was hearing all around me about Gandhiji’s struggle against the British Raj. … When I finally met Gandhiji, I learnt all about his ideas of nonviolence and his Constructive program. They changed my life forever.”

Dr. V.K.Balakrishnan, whose parents were involved in India’s nonviolent stuggle for freedom under Gandhi’s leadership, is a professor at the University of Maine.