Badal: Pashtun redress, feud and settlement

Badal (بدل) is the Pashto word for an exchange, and in Pashtunwali it is the duty to answer an injury in kind. It turned a killing into a debt that a family carried until it was paid, forgiven or settled. Feuds were stopped by truces, blood money and the giving of girls in marriage, and Pakistani and Afghan law now forbid that last part. More on the wider code is in Pashtunwali: the Pashtun code of honour and the jirga.

At a glance

• Raverty's dictionary (1860) defines badal as "Exchange, substitution, retaliation". The same word means a swap and a revenge. [11]

• The most dangerous enemy was the cousin, the tarbur. Ahmed counted about sixty cousins killed in one Mohmand settlement between 1933 and 1973. [9]

• Settlements paid in money, cattle and girls. In Bannu in the 1870s a murdered man's price was 1,000 to 1,200 rupees. [4]

• Pakistan has punished giving a girl in settlement since 2005 and Afghanistan since 2009, and both practices are still reported. [2, 12, 13, 17]

The word in Raverty's dictionary

Raverty gives badal as "Exchange, substitution, retaliation", and as a preposition, "In exchange for, on account of". On the same page adal-badal is "Exchange, barter, chopping and changing". [11] The language does not separate the swap from the revenge, and Ahmed's glossary notes that badal is also the word for an exchange marriage. [9]

The neighbouring entries show how the subject was described. Khūn-bahā (خون بها) is "The price of blood, forfeit or retaliation for murder". Khūn-dār (خون دار) is "Bloody", and second, "One who has killed another in a feud, and also one who has to take revenge for the death of a clansman". One word names both the killer and the avenger. Dushmanī (دښمني) is "Enmity, hostility, hatred, detestation". Ghach (غچ) is "Malice, spite, rancour, resentment", and ghach kkhal (غچ کښل) is "to vent one's hatred or malice on, to take revenge or vengeance". [11]

What counts as an injury

James Spain, writing in 1962, said that the duty to take revenge falls on the man wronged, on his family and on his tribe. Most feuds, he said, begin over zar, zan or zamin, and some begin over "a negative act", one man failing to show another the respect the other thinks is his due. [7] Enriquez, a British officer writing in 1910, said that abduction was "the commonest cause of feuds", and listed the same three words. [5] Pennell, a medical missionary at Bannu, said Afghans put 90 per cent of feuds under those heads, though he gave no count. [6]

Lindholm recorded a Swat feud in the 1970s that began when a boy refused to let his second cousin play football with him. The quarrel spread to the boys' fathers. When his fieldwork ended three men were dead, and the fields of both families had been sold for weapons or left fallow. [10]

Custom also scaled the injury. Elphinstone, whose account first appeared in 1815, was told that among the western Afghans a murder was answered by twelve girls given in marriage, a hand, an ear or a nose by six, a broken tooth by three, and a wound above the forehead by one. Any other small offence was "expiated by apologies and submission". [3] Ahmed, who knew the Mohmand in the 1970s, puts the line at death: it separates a casual affair from a serious one, because it brings in "the irrevocable laws of badal". [9]

Who has to answer

The sources disagree. Elphinstone wrote that if the offender was out of reach the injured man might take revenge on a relation, and in some cases on any man of the tribe. [3] Enriquez wrote that no mercy was shown and that only a few tribes spared women and children, adding that the Waziris were said not to harm them. [5] Lindholm found the opposite among the Swat Pukhtun: revenge was taken on the killer, and perhaps on his sons and father, but "the notion of group responsibility is not developed". [10] Each writer saw one region and one period.

The limits were not always kept. Caroe, who served on the frontier, said that for men bent on a feud the sanctions of religion were no more effective than hospitality, and recalled court cases in which revenge was taken on a man at prayer. [8] Ahmed records a case where the limit was felt. In 1963 two of Atta Khan's nephews killed a man who was their host. Atta was horrified, and to him, Ahmed writes, it was "the grossest violation of hospitality". [9]

The cousin

Raverty defines turbūr (تربور) as "A father's brother's son, a cousin", and turbūr walī as "Enmity to relations also, very common amongst the Afghans". [11] Elphinstone noticed the same thing: "Turboor, which literally means a cousin, is now the common word in Pushtoo for a rival." [3] Lindholm adds that it is a term of reference, never of address except as an insult, since cousins are called "brother". [10]

Thorburn printed Pashto proverbs from Bannu in 1876. Two of them, numbers 1 and 13 under "Enmity", read in his Pashto:

د تربرو غاښ په تربرو ماتيږي

da tarburo ghākh pa tarburo mātegī

A cousin's tooth breaks on a cousin's.

چه ځوی ورور ئې وي وژلي د هغه لاس دي چا نيولي

che dzwey wror ye wi wazhli, da hagha las de chā niwuley

Whose son and brother have been murdered, who has restrained his hand?

Thorburn's note on the second is his own generalisation: every family of note had its blood feud, and every man in it knew how many of the other family had to be killed before the account could be balanced. [4]

Pennell tells of a chief at Shlozan in the Kurram valley who took a visiting British officer up into his tower and pulled him back from a window, because a cousin had been watching it for months hoping to shoot him there. The chief was later shot there by the cousin. [6] Of seventeen killings of men by men that Lindholm knew in detail in Swat, seven were of close cousins or their servants. [10]

One Mohmand settlement, 1928 to 1973

Ahmed followed the Shati Khel, a Halimzai Mohmand settlement in the Gandab valley, through official files and interviews. In 1928 two rival leaders signed a truce for twelve years. New building was forbidden, with a fine of 500 rupees. Statements taken by the Assistant Political Agent in 1933 show how thin the line between enemy and kin was. A Malok elder, Pasham Gul, said: "We are tarburs of Anmir, about 10 years ago Anmir murdered 5 of our tarburs. After that feud we inter-married with each other and settled our feuds." He said Anmir's sons had hit him with stones when he tried to stop them netting quail in his field, and that Anmir then tried to drive him out of his own village. [9]

Between 1933 and 1940, when another truce was signed, 29 people were killed in Shati Khel alone, 17 of them from Atta Khan's faction. [9] In Malik Gul's statement, Said Mir and Atta Khan together killed six of Anmir's men. About thirty-two years later one of those six, Zarin, was avenged. His widow was Atta's own sister. She had kept his bullet-riddled waistcoat, shown it to her son Murtaza as he grew up, and told Ahmed: "I kept my husband's torn waistcoat and vowed that when Murtaza grew to be a man I would take my husband's badal from my brother." Murtaza, three years old when his father died, shot Atta's eldest son Hazrat Khan from the top of a bus. People praised the act, and said of her, "After all the mother was also a real Pukhtuna". [9]

Atta complained that his rival Shahzada's men had broken the truce, and Shahzada was fined 12,000 rupees for a killing on the road and 3,000 for breaking the truce, later cut to 8,000 in all. [9] Ahmed's total for 1933 to 1973 is about sixty cousins killed. Feroz, a young man whose mother was Atta's sister and whose wife was a granddaughter of Shahzada, told him: "Men would not spare their closest relatives." [9]

Waiting, and forgiving

Ahmed and Lindholm both record the saying that a Pukhtun who takes revenge after a hundred years says he took it quickly. Ahmed gives it as "The Pukhtun who took revenge after a hundred years said I took it quickly" and cites his own earlier book. Lindholm's version is "a Pukhtun waits for a century to take revenge and says, 'I took it quickly.'" I found neither in Pashto, so there is no Pashto text here. [9, 10]

Lindholm's case shows the wait. A man was killed in a fight in the early 1950s, and the killer offered blood money, which the family accepted. After nearly thirty years the dead man's son killed the killer in his hospital bed. The killer went into permanent exile, and Pukhtun men praised the act. Lindholm's comment: "blood money, or even the donation of a woman, is never adequate compensation for death. Blood demands blood." [10] Caroe made the same point about a British scheme to settle feuds by balancing the blood money owed on each side: it was "in most cases contrary to Pakhtu to accept blood-money in final settlement of a feud". [8]

Elphinstone, on the other hand, found that in most tribes the reconciliation was "cordial and permanent". [3] The sources do not say which was typical.

A feud did sometimes end by choice. Ahmed records a run of killings among the Kado lineage of Bela Mohmandan in the 1940s and 1950s, between brothers and cousins. It ended when the son of one dead man was persuaded to give up revenge, and two marriages joined the lines. The men and women of the lineage asked, "Why should we pluck our own feathers?" Earlier, Daulat, a respected elder whose father had been the first killed, "had forgiven his father's murderers". Ahmed says this act ends the law of badal, and explains it partly by the cost of badal and the example of senior men. [9]

Pennell saw another ending at Peiwar in the Kurram valley. After a faction fight the two sides of the village street had fired at each other from ambush, so the houses were joined by small doors, and both sides had agreed not to shoot while people fetched water from the stream. His host pointed to the man who had shot his brother and said they were good friends now, because "the debt is even on both sides. I have killed the same number in his family." Pennell wrote that after such a fight the dead on both sides are added up, and if they are equal both sides can make peace without loss of honour. [6]

How feuds were stopped

Elphinstone describes the ritual of the suppliant. A killer who did not want to flee his tribe asked a respected man to speak for him. That man gathered other elders, mullahs and sayyids, and all went to the injured man's house. The injured man, if he would not make peace, left his house before they came. When he was found, "the criminal appears dressed in a shroud, puts a naked sword into the hand of his enemy, and tells him that his life is in his power." The visitors begged for pardon, and it ended with the injured man forgiving and receiving compensation. Elphinstone added that powerful men thought it weakness to complain to a jirga, and held out until the injuries on both sides were equal. [3]

By Thorburn's account, a murderer in Bannu in the 1870s usually paid 1,000 to 1,200 rupees for a full-grown man, rarely in cash. The sum was made up in cattle and girls by "a fixed table of exchange". Unmarried girls who had reached puberty were priced at 200 rupees each, and children at half that. A girl's status, he wrote, did not change: she "merely enters a new family, the head of which disposes of her hand in marriage". [4] Elphinstone's explanation was that the practice began in the expense of buying a bride from her father. [3]

Truces were agreed between whole sections. Enriquez describes a twelve-month truce of the Adam Khel that ended in 1908. The tribe set up pillars to witness the sulh, the peace. When one man shot an enemy in breach of it, the Jowaki jirga of 600 elders arrived, lodged with the offender, and refused to do business for a week while he fed them. They burnt his house, fined him 2,000 rupees, gave 1,000 to the dead man's relatives and kept the rest. The truce ended on the day of Eid in October 1908. Within a week five men were shot in the Kohat darra (pass) and two more in the Jowaki hills. [5]

Ahmed prints a complete teega in his appendix, made at the political bungalow between Abdullah and Shahzada, for fifteen years from 26 July 1940. The penalty for killing a mashar (an elder of standing) was 5,000 rupees, and for a kashar (a man of little standing) 2,500, half to the government and half to the dead man's heirs. A wound with a sharp weapon cost half that, and a blow with a blunt one 100 and 50. A night murder was decided by oath on the Qur'an by ten men the complainant chose. Attacking a village cost 5,000 and a tower 500, and hiring an assassin was forbidden. A fine could be taken from the whole village if the culprit could not pay. [9] Ahmed's glossary gives teega as "lit. stone". Neither he nor Enriquez ties that to the pillars.

The state and the feud

Thorburn described Bannu before 1872. Witnesses would not speak because they feared the killer's friends, convictions were rare, and Bannuchis with towers slept in them with the ladder pulled up. To a Pathan, he wrote, an inherited blood feud with six or eight foes watching for his life was one of the "proud patents of respectability and good birth". The Frontier Crimes Regulation of January 1872 allowed the Deputy Commissioner to refer a murder to a jirga for trial by their own usage, with fines only. Thorburn wrote in 1875 that murders from enmity were now rare, "only twelve or fifteen in the year". [4]

Caroe, who thought the Regulation a failure where it was used beside the ordinary courts, because it "satisfied neither the law nor the custom", set out the problem in one line: "Pathan custom requires the satisfaction of the aggrieved rather than the punishment of the aggressor." [8]

Pakistan's law still lets a family settle a murder. In a case of intentional murder (qatl-i-amd), section 309 of the Penal Code lets an adult sane wali waive his right to qisas without compensation, and section 310 lets him compound it by accepting badl-i-sulh, "the mutually agreed compensation according to Shari'ah". Section 310 adds a proviso: "a female shall not be given in marriage or otherwise in badal-i-sulh." [1] This is Arabic-derived legal vocabulary, close to the Pashto word but not the same one.

Girls given in settlement

Caroe called the girl a swara and wrote that giving girls in marriage was "a very common method of composing a feud". [8] Ahmed defines swara as a marriage arranged among kin to conciliate or bind fighting groups, usually after a murder. [9]

Pakistan made it a crime in 2005. A Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of 2004, enacted on 11 January 2005 according to Dawn, added section 310A. A UN Women summary gives the penalty as rigorous imprisonment of three to ten years. [12] A report in Dawn of August 2006 shows its limits. A jirga in Buner had ordered a three-month-old girl given in swara, five accused were charged, and a court gave them bail because the law had not been extended to the Provincially Administered Tribal Areas, where Buner lay. [15] In 2011 Parliament replaced section 310A with a wider text. It covers a female given or forced into marriage "as badal-e-sulh, wanni, or swara or any other custom or practice under any name, in consideration of settling a civil dispute or a criminal liability", with imprisonment of three to seven years and a fine of 500,000 rupees. [2] The press still reports it. A 2022 article in The Friday Times says the custom persists. A Peshawar journalist told it that cases fell after 2011, and it describes a Mardan woman, Sana Gul, whom a jirga decided to give in swara after her brother was accused of killing a neighbour. The same journalist gave a figure of about 66 minor girls given in Mardan and Swabi between 2002 and 2006. [17]

In Afghanistan the practice is called baad. The Elimination of Violence against Women law, enacted in August 2009, lists baad among its offences, which UNAMA defines as giving a woman or girl away to settle a dispute. [14] A UN Women summary of its Article 25 says the offender faces imprisonment of up to ten years, that mediators and witnesses face a medium term, and that the marriage is annulled if the woman asks. I could not open the official gazette text. [13] On 3 December 2021 the Taliban leadership issued a decree that, in Reuters's report, said "A woman is not a property, but a noble and free human being", and forbade giving a woman to end a dispute. [16] A 2024 report summarised in the jirga says the practice continues in some provinces.

Badal in the 1970s

In questionnaires among the Mohmand, 46 per cent of the tribal-area men and 34 per cent of the settled-area men named badal among the foremost features of Pukhtunwali. It ranked third in both groups. Ahmed concluded that badal "is an increasingly less important and more difficult activity" in the settled area, where courts and police were near, and attached little weight to the percentages themselves. [9]