خان عبدالغفار خان

He was Ghaffar Khan before he was Bacha Khan.

As long as he was Ghaffar Khan, we were just Pashtuns. Always superior to one another and ready to belittle each other in every situation. He wanted to weave us into a nation, for which he equipped us with education and political consciousness. Whatever history the British wrote for us in that era, they drew a picture of a gun alongside our shadow on the cover of every book and wrote tales of wars on every page. But when Bacha Khan arrived, he placed a pen in our hands and taught us to form new types of صف (ranks) for organization, discipline, and livelihood instead of making roosters, dogs, and cousins fight.

Wherever the effects of Bacha Khan's movement reached, there is still a big difference in the lifestyle, political understanding, and priorities of those areas and people compared to the areas and people where it could not reach.

He strived to instill all the good qualities of civilized, economically strong, and politically developed nations of India into his own nation. His path, too, like the path of today's enlightened Pashtuns, was blocked by reactionary and money-minded charlatans, but he kept moving forward, lighting one lamp from another.

If Pakistan had not been created suddenly at the end of the World War, the Pashtuns would have been relatively more educated, more prosperous, and more enlightened today. After the creation of Pakistan, and due to him not being allowed free movement, everything he had sown was wasted under state patronage. He had stopped Pashtuns from committing violence against outsiders, but now Pashtuns were transformed into a machinery of violence that used this learned violence against the practitioners of non-violence, i.e., their own brothers.

The areas where Pashtuns were not allowed to be reached by Bacha Khan were turned into permanent centers of violence. And now it has come to the point that peace marches and uprisings are consistently taking place in these areas, but the angry and frightened fairy of peace is not ready to return there in any way. Another major reason for peace not returning is that the charlatans who had made the inhabitants there world-hating mujahideen and eternal heaven-dwellers are still their leaders and emirs today. Peace in Pashtun areas can return by returning to being Pashtuns. Remember, before bringing war, those elders of yours who used to sit in a Jirga and make peace among you were killed, so that war-mongers could become your leaders.

Even today, the Pashtuns of Kurram can find peace again only by becoming Pashtuns. Otherwise, just as it is no longer possible for Bacha Khan to return, in the same way, peace can also depart forever.

#Shazar Jilani

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