Chapter 05 · 1937–1948
The Frontier
in 1947
A Muslim-majority province governed by the Congress for the last decade of British rule, asked in July 1947 to choose between two options — neither of which was the one its largest political movement had asked for.
The setting
A province that
was governed
differently
Understanding 1947 in the Frontier requires holding two unusual facts together. The first is constitutional: the North-West Frontier Province, created in 1901, was for decades treated by the British as a security buffer rather than an ordinary province. It received the constitutional reforms granted elsewhere in British India late and incompletely, and it was governed under exceptional law, including the Frontier Crimes Regulation.
The second is electoral, and it is the fact most often left out of general accounts of Partition. The NWFP was overwhelmingly Muslim — and it voted Congress. After the provincial elections of 1937, and again after those of 1946, the province was governed by a Congress ministry led by Dr Khan Sahib, Ghaffar Khan's elder brother, on the strength of the Khudai Khidmatgar organisation in the settled districts.
This was a serious problem for the two-nation argument. If the demand for Pakistan rested on the claim that the Muslim League alone spoke for India's Muslims, the Frontier was a standing counter-example: the most solidly Muslim province in British India, returning Congress governments, led by a Muslim leader who rejected the premise outright.
The arguments
Three positions, honestly stated
The politics of the Frontier in 1946–47 were genuinely contested, and the participants were not arguing in bad faith. Each of these positions had real support.
Neither ballot option
Ghaffar Khan opposed the partition of India. When it became unavoidable, his movement's position was that the Frontier should have the option of independence, or of a Pashtun state — and that a referendum offering only India or Pakistan did not put the real question. Having governed the province twice by election, they regarded a fresh plebiscite on new terms as a change of the rules.
A Muslim province belongs in Pakistan
The League's case was that a province with an overwhelming Muslim majority self-evidently belonged in the new state, that Congress rule there rested on a local organisation rather than on any Frontier commitment to a united India, and that a direct referendum would settle the matter. League support in the province grew substantially in 1946–47.
A rapid, defensible transfer
The Mountbatten plan of 3 June 1947 needed a mechanism for a Congress-governed Muslim-majority province in a partition organised on communal lines. A referendum with two options produced a rapid and administratively defensible answer. The demand for a third option was refused.
June – July 1947
Six weeks that decided the Frontier
The Mountbatten plan
Partition is announced. The Congress leadership accepts it. Ghaffar Khan had opposed the division of India throughout, and the Khudai Khidmatgar were not consulted about the decision that would place them in another country.
The Bannu Resolution
A loya jirga at Bannu, attended by Khudai Khidmatgar leaders, tribal representatives and Mirzali Khan (the Faqir of Ipi), demands an independent state of Pashtunistan comprising the Pashtun territories, rather than accession to either dominion. The British refuse to place the option on the ballot.
The referendum, boycotted
Polling proceeds with two options: India or Pakistan. Ghaffar Khan, Dr Khan Sahib, the Khudai Khidmatgar and the provincial Congress boycott it, on the ground that the choice they had asked for was excluded.
The result
289,244 votes for Pakistan against 2,874 for India — over 99 per cent of votes cast. Of a registered electorate of about 572,800, roughly 51 per cent voted, so the votes for Pakistan came to a little over half of the total electorate. Both readings of that arithmetic are true, and both were used.
The Frontier becomes part of Pakistan
The province accedes to the new state. The Congress ministry is dismissed shortly afterwards. The largest nonviolent movement in the subcontinent finds itself inside a country whose founding premise it had spent sixteen years contesting.
“You have thrown us to the wolves.”Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, to the Congress leadership, 1947 The sentence he is recorded as addressing to the Congress leadership — Gandhi among them — on its acceptance of Partition without consulting the Khudai Khidmatgar. Widely reported in the accounts of the period and in reference works on his life.
Consequences
What Partition cost, and who paid it
Partition in 1947 displaced many millions of people across the subcontinent and cost an enormous number of lives. That history is documented at length elsewhere, and this page does not describe it in detail; the concern here is the specific consequence for the Frontier and for the movement.
Ghaffar Khan did not leave. On 23 February 1948 he took the oath of allegiance to Pakistan in its first Constituent Assembly, accepting the new state as a fact while continuing to argue for provincial autonomy within it. In May 1948 he helped form the Pakistan Azad Party, the country's first national opposition party.
The response was rapid. On 12 August 1948, at Babrra in Charsadda district, a large gathering of Khudai Khidmatgar supporters demonstrating for the release of detained leaders was fired upon; the death toll is generally reported in the hundreds. The movement was banned the following month. Ghaffar Khan was held without charge from 1948 to 1954.
There is a bleak symmetry to the record. The organisation had held to its oath through eighteen years of colonial repression. Within a year of independence it was banned, and its members were being killed, by a government of the country they had become citizens of.
The consequences ran on for decades: the One Unit scheme, which merged the provinces of West Pakistan and which Ghaffar Khan was imprisoned in 1956 for opposing; further imprisonment through to 1964; and then eight years of exile. Those years are covered in Legacy.
