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The university attacked by the Pakistani Taliban on Wednesday was named for a towering figure in Pakistani history — a nonviolent Pashtun activist who became known as the “Frontier Gandhi” for his advocacy of nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule.
The massacre was carried out on the 28th anniversary of the death of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who became known as Bacha Khan, as the university prepared to hold a poetry recital in his memory.
Born in 1889, Mr. Ghaffar Khan rose to prominence in the 1920s when he founded a movement that the British called the Red Shirts, whose members walked through India to encourage civil disobedience. He was a Muslim who measured well over six feet tall and wore homespun white clothing. He first drew support from the traditional Pashtun areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but became closely allied with Mahatma Gandhi’s Congress Party in the 1930s.
“He led one of the biggest, widely accepted and followed social movements in a society that is known for violence,” said Abubakar Siddique, a journalist and the author of “The Pashtun Question: The Unresolved Key to the Future of Pakistan and Afghanistan.”He earned his nickname at a huge gathering in his early days, when people thought he might declare himself a bacha, or king. “His supporters would say he was not the ruler of any country, but he was the ruler of many Pashtun hearts,” Mr. Siddique said.
Mr. Ghaffar Khan opposed the partition of India and Pakistan after independence in 1947, and when it was carried out, he toured India with Mr. Gandhi in an effort to quell inter-communal violence. Afterward, he pushed for autonomy for Pashtun areas in Pakistan, evoking the ire of national authorities. He spent nearly 30 years in British and Pakistani jails or under house arrest, but never abandoned his philosophy of nonviolent resistance.
“In Pakistan he was always controversial, because they said he was so popular with the Congress Party and a personal favorite of Gandhi, so he could not be a good Pakistani,” said Akbar Ahmed, the chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington and a former Pakistani ambassador to the United Kingdom. “This legendary figure was honored more abroad than in his home country.”
Mr. Ghaffar Khan spent much of his later life in exile in Afghanistan. Dr. Ahmed recalled an electrifying public appearance that he made in Peshawar in the mid-1970s, when Dr. Ahmed was a young officer stationed there.
“He was a very old man with a white beard and very simple clothes. He could barely stand and he’s in the midst of half a million people, as if this is a rock concert with The Beatles or the Rolling Stones,” Dr. Ahmed said. “I was privileged, I realized. This was a moment of history.”
Pashtuns are known for a long warrior tradition, and were feared by British colonialists who regarded the Khyber Pass as a notoriously dangerous area. Both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban draw most of their members and support from Pashtun communities. Even so, Mr. Ghaffar Khan’s message of nonviolence resonated deeply with Pashtuns and others all over South Asia, Mr. Siddique said.
Bacha Khan university was founded in 2012, during a period when Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province was governed by the Awami National Party, which is now led by Mr. Ghaffar Khan’s grandson. The local branch of the party, which espouses left-of-center secularism, won elections in 2008.
It also became a target of the Pakistani Taliban. Afrasiab Khattak, a former senator for the A.N.P. and the president of the Roshaan Democratic Institute, said 1,000 members of his party had been killed in the Taliban’s attacks on party gatherings and assassinations.
“They are against peace, and this is what our party also stands for,” Mr. Khattak said. Around the same time of the party’s electoral success, though, a branch of the A.N.P. in Karachi became embroiled in violent turf wars. Karachi is home to the world’s largest Pashtun population, and many senior A.N.P. leaders fled the city in 2013 as the Taliban gained power in ethnic Pashtun areas.
Instead of being buried in his ancestral graveyard, Mr. Ghaffar Khan was buried in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in the heart of traditionally Pashtun lands. The Associated Press reported that 200,000 people attended the funeral, which was marred by two bombings.
Mr. Siddique said his choice of a final resting place was symbolic of his lifelong message: He chose to be buried there to show that the borders cannot separate people.
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