Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

Early life and founding of the Khudai Khidmatgar

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born in 1890 in Utmanzai, in the North-West Frontier Province (present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan), into a Pashtun landowning family. He was educated partly in mission schools and turned early to social and educational reform work among the Pashtun population, founding schools intended to reduce reliance on colonial and madrasa education alike. In 1929 he founded the Khudai Khidmatgar ("Servants of God"), a movement of Pashtun volunteers committed to nonviolent resistance to British rule, organised along disciplined, quasi-military lines but explicitly renouncing violence — a striking departure from the region's association with armed tribal resistance. Members wore red-dyed uniforms, giving the movement its popular name, the "Red Shirts."

Alliance with the Congress and the epithet "Frontier Gandhi"

The Khudai Khidmatgar aligned closely with the Indian National Congress, and Ghaffar Khan developed a close personal and political relationship with Mohandas Gandhi, whose commitment to nonviolence he shared and adapted to the Pashtun context. This alliance, together with his consistent advocacy of nonviolent resistance, earned him the epithet "Frontier Gandhi" among contemporaries and in later usage, though he is also known by the honorific Bacha Khan. He was repeatedly imprisoned by British colonial authorities over the following decades for his political activity.

Opposition to Partition

Ghaffar Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar opposed the Partition of India in 1947, favouring instead either a united independent India or, alternatively, an autonomous or independent Pashtun state rather than incorporation into the new Dominion of Pakistan. This position placed him at odds with the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan and left him politically isolated once Partition proceeded; the North-West Frontier Province, despite the Khudai Khidmatgar's strength there, was included in Pakistan following a 1947 referendum that the Congress-aligned movement boycotted as illegitimate.

Later life

After Partition, Ghaffar Khan remained a political figure in Pakistan, continuing to advocate for Pashtun autonomy and rights, for which he was repeatedly imprisoned and at times exiled by successive Pakistani governments over several decades, spending a substantial portion of his later life in detention. He received India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1987, becoming the first non-Indian citizen so honoured. He died in Peshawar in 1988 and, at his request, was buried in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.