Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai (Khan Shaheed): Pashtun nationalist of Balochistan

At a glance

• Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai was born on 7 July 1907 in Inayatullah Karez, a village of Gulistan in what was British Balochistan, now Qilla Abdullah district, and was martyred in Quetta on 2 December 1973. [9, 10]

• He founded the Anjuman-i-Watan in 1938 and published the weekly Istiqlal from Quetta. The Anjuman worked beside the Indian National Congress and the Khudai Khidmatgar but never merged with either. [1, 4, 9]

• Sources count his time in prison, under the British and under Pakistan, at between about 28 and 33 years. [3, 7, 10, 12]

• In 1970 he left the National Awami Party over the southern Pashtun districts being placed in Balochistan, and formed his own Pashtunkhwa party. [1, 10]

• Two hand grenades were thrown into his bedroom. No account cited here names who threw them. [6–8]

• His followers call him Khan Shaheed. His party, the Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, is led by his son Mahmood Khan Achakzai. [1, 10]

A village boy in Gulistan

Achakzai was born in Inayatullah Karez, a village named after his great-grandfather. [9] His parents were Noor Muhammad Khan and Dilbara. [1] The family tells a story of service at the Afghan court. The party's account says an ancestor, Barkhurdar Khan, was a close confidant of Ahmad Shah Abdali and a general at the third battle of Panipat in 1761, and a columnist in The News repeats the tradition that a forefather commanded a regiment there. [1, 10] Tobawal, a lecturer at the University of Balochistan, gives the line of descent as Achakzai himself wrote it in his autobiography: Noor Muhammad, Sultan Muhammad, Inayatullah, Bostan, Barkhurdar. [3]

He learned to read at home and in the village mosque, in Persian and Arabic, and entered the middle school at Gulistan in 1919. He came first in the province in the fourth class and won a scholarship of twelve rupees a month. He left after the eighth class and traded in fruit in Sindh and Punjab. [1] Muhammad Akbar Notezai, reviewing the English edition of the autobiography in Dawn, writes that a degree would have secured him a government post, but he did not aspire to serve the British. [9]

His first arrest came before his political career. The sources date it to 1928 or 1929. Notezai says it was to stop him joining the Afghan king Amanullah, who was then trying to recover his throne. [1, 9] A columnist in The News adds that he was held with sixteen companions and freed after 28 days, when Amanullah went into exile. [10]

Gandhi, Jacobabad and a newspaper

In 1929 he went with his brother Abdul Salam and his cousin Ayub Khan Achakzai to the annual Congress session at Lahore, where he admired the speeches of Saifuddin Kitchlew. [1] Notezai writes that he named a son born in the spring of 1930 Saifuddin, after Kitchlew, and gave up hunting that year, when he "joined the national freedom movement which was based on forbearance and non-violence." [9]

In July 1931 he travelled to Bombay and met Gandhi at the Gujarat Vidyapith during Gandhi's stop at Ahmedabad. He told Gandhi that he had come to tell the leaders going to the Round Table Conference in London how bad conditions were in Balochistan, which was also part of India. [9] The columnist in The News quotes the memoir on the journey: "I learnt in these 15 days what I could not have learned in 15 years." [10] He took to khadi and the Gandhi cap, and was arrested repeatedly for it. [9] The nickname "Balochistan's Gandhi" came from a Karachi journalist, A. K. Jangiani. In the memoir Achakzai writes that "Friends and Hindus would call me by the adjunct by way of love and respect, while my opponents would use it acrimoniously." [9]

In December 1932 he presided over the All India Baloch conference at Jacobabad. [9, 10] He was jailed again in 1934 for three years. [1, 10]

The newspaper followed. Achakzai writes that when he first asked to publish a paper he was told political publication was banned, so he began a struggle to have the Press Act extended to Balochistan, which the sources date to 1935 or 1936. [1, 3, 9] The Quetta earthquake of 1935 killed his friend Yusuf Aziz Magsi, a Baloch poet and nationalist who wrote under the name Aziz, while Achakzai was in Mach jail about 50 kilometres away. He named his press the Aziz Press in his friend's memory. [9] From it came Istiqlal, "independence", in Urdu and Pashto. Tobawal puts the first issue in June 1938 and its print run at 2,500 copies a week. The sources disagree on the date, giving anything from 1935 to 1938. [1, 3, 8] A committee of friends, including Abdul Aziz Kurd and Muhammad Amin Khosa, managed it. [3] The magistrate withdrew its printing rights in 1943 according to The News; Tobawal says the Muslim League government banned it in 1950. [3, 10]

The Anjuman-i-Watan

The Anjuman-i-Watan, "the homeland association", was founded in 1938. The party's history gives 21 May, Tobawal says June, and all agree that Achakzai was elected its president. [1, 3] Razia Gul, in a Pashto journal of the University of Balochistan, lists the working committee of 1939: Achakzai as president, Muhammad Hussain Anqa as general secretary, Arbab Abdul Qadir as secretary and Seth Donomal as treasurer. [4] Its aims, she writes, were to end British rule and to obtain constitutional reforms for Balochistan like those of the other provinces. [4] In Kalat, the princely state, a separate party was active. Gul says that when its 1939 session at Mastung was attacked and its leaders exiled, its offices moved to Quetta, where it worked with Achakzai's Anjuman, among others through Ghous Bakhsh Bizenjo and Gul Khan Naseer. [4]

How strong was the Anjuman? The scholar Martin Axmann, quoted in The Friday Times, writes that before independence the Pashtuns of British Balochistan under the Achakzai leadership "had become a prominent, substantial, and serious political force", probably more influential than the Kalat State National Party. [11] The same article quotes a letter of the Agent to the Governor-General saying that the local Muslim urban and tribal population followed the Anjuman-i-Watan, while the non-local urban Muslims favoured the League. [11] Javed Haider Syed, in a history of the Balochistan Muslim League in the Pakistan Journal of History and Culture, tells it differently. In his telling the League's president Qazi Isa won over the religious scholars in 1939, and the Nawab of Jogezai pledged to the "Old Islam" of the League against the "New Islam" of the Congress and Achakzai's Anjuman. [2] On 14 July 1939 League workers patrolled Quetta with placards telling the public not to attend the Watan's first annual conference, because the Watan was an ally of the Congress. [2]

Congress, Bacha Khan and the war

The Anjuman called Bacha Khan to Balochistan in 1939, and the two men toured the province together. [1, 4] Gul says the Anjuman kept in touch with the Khudai Khidmatgar and the Congress. [4] The Anjuman allied with the Congress without merging into it. Notezai, reviewing the memoir, says Achakzai "was never associated with the Indian National Congress", and when the war began the Anjuman "independently decided not to help the British". [9] When Gandhi began individual civil disobedience, Notezai adds, the Anjuman offered fifty members, though it had no organisational tie to the Congress. [9] Syed, from the other side, says the Watan and the Congress opposed the war effort and the League answered by resolving to back the British. [2] For the Frontier side of the same movement, see Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar.

The 1946 election to the Central Legislative Assembly tested the Anjuman against the League. Achakzai stood against Nawab Muhammad Khan Jogezai. Syed, citing a report of Mir Jaafar Khan Jamali to Jinnah, says Achakzai received 13 votes and Jogezai 61, and that by the end of 1946 the Watan's candidates had also lost the Quetta municipal election. [2] Syed concludes that no top Congress leader ever came to Balochistan to support its favourites there, and that the pro-Congress elements became alienated from the people. [2] How the Frontier voted in 1947 is told in the 1947 referendum.

Prison in Pakistan and Wror Pashtun

Achakzai's party says that as soon as Pakistan was born he and other Pashtun leaders were jailed, from 1948 until 1954. [1] The News dates his first imprisonment in the new state three years after independence. [10] The Friday Times says the charge was "disruptive propaganda" in his weekly. [11] Notezai notes that the autobiography includes his letters to Jinnah and to Liaquat Ali Khan and an account of his first arrest in the new country. [9] Tobawal says he began writing the memoir in prison in 1948. [3]

When he came out he founded Wror Pashtun, "Pashtun brotherhood", in 1954. [1, 10] The memoir, quoted in The Friday Times, states its aim as a "separate administrative unit of the Pashtoons called Pashtoonistan" made of the contiguous territories of Pakistan where they live. The same passage says he rejected any idea of bringing the Pashtun homelands under Afghanistan: "no Pashtoon can even think of these lines." [11] He was jailed again in July 1954, and again in 1955 and 1956, by his party's count, while the One Unit scheme was imposed. [1] The Lahore High Court freed him in 1956, according to Gul. [4] In an article written in Lahore district jail on 25 October 1956, quoted by Tobawal, he wrote: "I have spent the best portion of my life in the British and Muslim regimes jails." [3]

The National Awami Party and the split

In 1956 and 1957 Wror Pashtun, the Khudai Khidmatgar and several other groups joined to form the National Awami Party, which wanted One Unit abolished and the provinces drawn on linguistic lines. [1] The News names among its members Mian Iftikharuddin, Maulana Bhashani, G. M. Syed, Bacha Khan, Achakzai and Ghous Bakhsh Bizenjo. [10] Martial law came in 1958. A military court sentenced him, to 14 years by his party's count and to ten by The News, and he was released in 1968. [1, 4, 10] Gul describes a crowd welcoming him in Quetta. [4]

One Unit, which the same article covers from the Frontier's side, was dissolved in 1969. [4] At this point, the party says, NAP's leaders did not keep to the linguistic principle. The southern Pashtun districts became part of the new province of Balochistan. He argued inside the party for merging them with the Frontier province, travelled to Kabul to discuss it with Bacha Khan, and when he failed he formed the National Awami Party Pashtunkhwa on 26 August 1970 at Hanna Orak, Quetta. [1] The News dates it to July and says he left over Pashtun rights. [10] Notezai writes that his relations with Bacha Khan were not warm, because Achakzai argued for taking the Pashtun areas out of Balochistan and joining them to the Frontier province. [9]

Writers disagree on who wanted what. A Dawn writer wrote in 2012 that Achakzai wished to bring Balochistan's Pashtuns closer to those of the Frontier, who were nearly half of the province's people, and that this angered Wali Khan, who did not want them identified with the Pashtuns of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He also wrote that the Baloch community did not want to share power with the Pashtuns settled in Balochistan. [7] The party's own account puts the decision on NAP's leaders. [1] See Khan Abdul Wali Khan for the NAP leader's side. In the 1970 election Achakzai won a seat in the provincial assembly, beating, The News says, the candidates of both NAP factions and the JUI. [10] An Asia Times article says that for the 1970 election he advocated women's right to vote and challenged tribal taboos against it. [12] The party and Tobawal say he presided over the assembly's first meeting in 1972. [1, 3]

The night of 2 December 1973

The NAP government of Balochistan under Ataullah Mengal had fallen ten months earlier. Najib Alvi writes that on 15 February 1973 Bhutto dismissed the governors of Balochistan and the Frontier, then the whole Balochistan cabinet, and banned the NAP and arrested its leaders. [5] Akbar Bugti was governor by December. [6]

Dawn's report of the time, reprinted in 2023, says Achakzai was killed in the early hours of the 2nd by unidentified people who threw hand grenades into his bedroom in Quetta through a ventilator. He was 66. Agency reports in the same piece say his body was badly mutilated by the blast and his wristwatch had stopped at 3.50 a.m. Bugti ordered two days of mourning, Quetta's shops and hotels stayed shut, stones were thrown at public buildings, and armed police and army troops guarded vital installations. [6] Tobawal places the attack at about 4 a.m. at his house on Jamaluddin Afghani Road. [3] He was buried in the family graveyard of Inayatullah Karez. [1, 10]

Dawn wrote in 2012 that, 39 years on, nobody knew who killed him or why. [7] It reported that Bugti blamed the hatred Achakzai had stirred up between Pashtuns and Baloch, and that other analysts thought it a reaction to the failure of talks between Bhutto's party and the arrested NAP leaders. [7] In 2014 Dawn said simply that his killers had been at large since. [8]

The memoir and his other books

His autobiography, Zama Zhwand aw Zhwandun, is in Pashto. It was published in English as My Life and Times, translated by his son Muhammad Khan Achakzai, later governor of Balochistan, with the Khan Shaheed Research Centre in Quetta, in 705 pages. [9] Notezai describes four parts: childhood, education and family; politics and imprisonments; his newspaper and comrades; and his falling out with companions, a second marriage in 1946 and the events around independence. [9] He dedicated it to his wife. [9]

He also wrote a short book on the Pashto language and its script, Pashto Zhaba au Likdood, and a Pashto dictionary, Samad-ul-Lughat. He translated into Pashto Abul Kalam Azad's Tarjuman-ul-Quran, Saadi's Gulistan, Ghazali's Kimiya-yi Saadat and Shibli Numani's life of the Prophet, much of it in prison. [3, 4] Gul says he held that no language could progress unless it was easy for readers and writers, and that he proposed a new typewriter keyboard for Pashto. [4]

Khan Shaheed

His followers call him Khan Shaheed, "Khan the Martyr". The News says he is popularly known by it, and his party says he is fondly remembered and revered by followers and the Pashtun public under that name. [1, 10] Pashtun nationalists remember him as a martyr, and the Pashto poet Darwesh Durrani's poem Da Shaheed Qabr Ta, "To the grave of a martyr", includes the lines (in the English given by The News): "O grave. Now his blood-stained body has reached your lap." [10] On the anniversary in 2014 his party held a condolence meeting at Science College, Quetta, where Usman Kakar said that "Khan Shaheed always stood for democracy and parliament". [8] Dawn republished its 1973 report on the fiftieth anniversary in 2023. [6]

His party today is the Pashtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, led by his son Mahmood Khan Achakzai. [1, 10] Dawn reviewed the English edition of the memoir in December 2022. [9]