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IS BACHA KHAN OUR COMMON HERITAGE?

By: Nasser Yousaf

I will try my best to ensure that what I say and write here is not considered as a diatribe.

A few months ago, I came to know that an Eid fair at the site of the Takht Bhai monastery was attracting huge crowds. I considered that as a disturbing information and asked my journalist friend to find out if that indeed was true.

My friend contacted the director museum who informed him that the news was not only correct but that it was something that the museum and archaeology department treated as an achievement. The director's point was that such occasions provided an opportunity to the people to know about their past and their heritage.

I have not been to the said monastery after it was taken over by UNESCO. I just couldn't see the site lose its past grandeur to the newly carried out brick and mortar work. Before that, I used to visit the site frequently to bask in its primitive solitude and contemplate its past including how the Buddhist monks would meditate and carry out their daily chores on this serene hillock. 

The director's logic clean bowled me, as they say in cricket, and I thought it best not to pursue the matter further with him. One always flinches back where logic or reason may attract the least respect.

Many centuries later, not far from the Takht Bhai monastery, a man lived in the village called Uthmanzai in Charsadda. One has to single out that man because he came to be known worldwide. But quite strangely, that tall, tannish man with prominent facial features, notably his aquiline nose, had a soul like the Buddhist monks. It was strange because the area where he was born, bred and lived would give in easily to violence on trivial issues. 

But Bacha Khan, as Abdul Ghaffar Khan came to be known universally as such, was made in a very tranquil, composed and peaceful mould. It was as if he was made from a softer clay as his poet, sculptor and engineer son Abdul Ghani Khan would have loved to describe him. Perhaps, he had the Buddhist spell cast over his persona because despite being a landowner of considerable proportions, he lived stoically like the monks. Unfailingly dressed in the traditional handwoven cotton, he adapted to doing all his chores without a whimper or protest. 

This last aspect of his life was witnessed during his long periods of imprisonment in the remotest faraway corners, first of the British India and then in Pakistan. Since a man of such incredible self-discipline and resolute calm could not be expected to indulge in felony, it was always Bacha Khan's unbending conscience that landed him in jails. His incarceration extended over a period of several decades with such apathy on the part of his tormentors that Bacha Khan would not even know of the passing away of his family members.

Bacha Khan struggled for the independence of India from the British yoke. Undoubtedly, he drew his inspiration from the Indian freedom fighter Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It even earned Bacha Khan the epithet of 'Frontier's Gandhi. An epithet because his detractors wanted to disparage him by so aligning him with Gandhi who was seen in the narrower profile of a Hindu. But one is quite sure Bacha Khan considered that to be an honorific.

Nobel prize, even in the otherwise literary field, is too political and ideological or else Bacha Khan would have won it hands down for peace. His nonviolent movement in one of the most formidable lands of the world is such that it could be the subject matter of epics. But unfortunately, it is not so. 

Bacha Khan could be posthumously confronted on several accounts. Bacha Khan, like Gandhi in India, could not foresee religious zealotry overwhelming India, in particular, with such frenzy that a vast majority of Indians would keep reposing trust in rulers with a fanatical bent of mind. We now have the advantage of witnessing all that. Fanaticism has demolished the secular and tolerant fabric of India with a vengeance. 

Although India witnessed this transformation nearly six decades after it gained independence, yet great statesmanship would be expected to foresee it in its incipient stages. Gandhi himself fell victim to the fanatic streak sooner than feared. The same applies to Mohammad Ali Jinnah who too could not foresee unrestrained religiosity spoiling the fruits of his vision.

Bacha Khan had an exaggerated view of his clansmen's sense of loyalty and nationalism. He quite innocently, if not mistakenly, believed that Pashtuns would rally around a kind of nationhood. He appeared to conveniently ignore the fact that Pashtuns were by instincts bigoted, prejudiced and loved to live in a state of servility despite their overtly formidable inclinations to assert their point of view through brute force. 

His movement gave rise to rhetoric such as calling on Pashtuns to flock together or disappear and Pashtuns of the upper lands in Afghanistan and the the lower lands in the present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were one people. All this of no avail as time has proved it so ruthlessly.

Perhaps Bacha Khan had the perspicacity but his long imprisonment didn't allow him to see enough evidence of it on ground. He was up against the full might of the wily British who were using the hinterlands of their empire as a buffer zone against the feared intrusion of the Russians.

While Bacha Khan languished in jails, his illustrious child and the generous bard, Ghani Khan was surveying the scene and penning it down in his poetry. He made fun of how the clergy, the pirs and the elite Pashtuns had all been bought over by the British and pitted against an unarmed Pashtun struggler. Ghani Khan would mostly call such poetry as 'mumbo jumbo' in lighter vein but not without his signature satire:

O Pashtun, you cheat! you hoodwinked the mullah

He settled on lentil soup, staying aloof of flora

And the helpless Pir is at a loss whether to bark or crow

He couldn't grasp while his saintliness flew away 

I loved Uncle Jinnah arriving when the meal was laid

Neither beating nor the stick nor the bullets he heard of

Look at the lunatic he got old with a full stomach 

The system from the mouth through the intestines didn't bother him at all

Bacha Khan chose Afghanistan for his final resting place. Afghanistan was at that time under the Soviet Union's occupation but such was the state of his disillusionment that he preferred that occupied land because he considered it to be less torturous. He and his family were widely castigated for this decision.

If Bacha Khan was a politician, a more unambitious politician could not be found out in the annals of history. If he unflinchingly believed in nonviolence as a means to attaining his goal, a better example could not be found out anywhere in the world. If he believed that Pashtuns needed education, a better reformer than this indefatigable spirit could not be traced in the books. It can rightly be said that he worked for people who still refuse to understand him despite such monumental evidence on record. 

The monastery at Takht Bhai is indeed our heritage but we cannot relate to it in the present times. It is ludicrous to expect the Pashtuns with such philistine mindsets to call the ancient monks as their forefathers and preposterous to call the merrymaking at the site as appreciation of their past. The joke falls on its face.

Our heritage is Bacha Khan, but only if we try to understand it. Bacha Khan had such a towering character that even those calling themselves as his successors have absolutely no idea of. Bacha Khan had cultivated pockets of support throughout the erstwhile Frontier province but one has to say that his detractors far outnumbered his admirers. 

The space around Bacha Khan's teaching is shrinking fast. Bacha Khan didn't belong to a particular family or any one political party; he is our common heritage. Bacha Khan is the nonviolent face of the violent Pashtuns. The minnows claiming to be his successors have absolutely no capacity to understand this, leave alone the rest of his clansmen.