Khan Abdul Wali Khan: leader of the National Awami Party and the Awami National Party

At a glance

• Khan Abdul Wali Khan, called Baba by his followers, was the second son of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Bacha Khan, and a nephew of Dr Khan Sahib. He was born at Utmanzai in Charsadda. [2, 8]

• Dawn gives his birth as 11 January 1917. His father wrote that his second son was born in December 1915. [2, 8]

• He joined the Khudai Khidmatgar in 1942 and was jailed for five years and five months after 1947. [8]

• He led the National Awami Party (NAP) from 1968. [8] Its coalition governments in the North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan lasted from April 1972 to February 1973. [16]

• The government banned the NAP in February 1975 and tried him and about 80 others in the Hyderabad conspiracy case. General Zia-ul-Haq dropped the case in 1977. [8, 13, 14]

• He was the first president of the Awami National Party (ANP) from 1986, left politics after losing his seat in 1990, and died in Peshawar on 26 January 2006. [8–10]

A son of Utmanzai

His father's autobiography gives the birth of the second son, Wali, in December 1915, with the elder son Ghani about three years old. [2] Dawn's profile, printed the day after his death, gives 11 January 1917, and I. A. Rehman's obituary says he was born in the year of the Russian revolution. [8, 9] The two dates are a year apart and neither can be checked against a register; Dawn's is the one now in general use.

Dawn says he went first to the Islamia High School, one of the chain of schools his father had started, and then to a school in Dehra Dun, where he passed his Cambridge examination in 1933. Eyesight trouble ended his studies. [8] He was a boy when the British came to Utmanzai. On 13 May 1930, a few weeks after the shooting in Peshawar's Qissa Khwani bazaar, troops and a deputy commissioner surrounded the village and wrecked the Khudai Khidmatgar office. His father, who was in prison, later wrote that his son Wali, then fourteen, had gone to the office after school and was sitting with the men when a soldier pointed a bayonet at him. A Muslim soldier put out a hand in front of the blade, and a villager, Hassan Khan, led the boy downstairs. [2] Tendulkar's biography prints an eyewitness version in which the boy shouts back at the deputy commissioner that he is the son of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. [6]

Dawn dates his political career from 1942, when he joined the Khudai Khidmatgar. He was first arrested in 1943. By 1947 he was a member of the All India Congress Committee and joint secretary of the Frontier branch of the party. [8] The political history of those years, the 1946 election, the referendum and the dismissal of his uncle's ministry, is told in the article on the 1947 referendum.

Prison after Pakistan, 1948 to 1953

On 15 June 1948 the Frontier government arrested Bacha Khan near Bahadur Khel in Kohat during a tour of the southern districts. Wali and two others were arrested with him. [6] Dawn says Wali was put in Haripur jail on that date. In February 1949 he was moved to Mach in Balochistan, in May 1951 to Quetta, in 1952 to Dera Ismail Khan, and back to Haripur in March 1952. [8] He was freed on 14 October 1953, after five years and five months. [8]

On release he began talks. Dawn says he opened negotiations with the federal government to calm its fears about the Khudai Khidmatgar and met the Frontier chief minister Abdul Rashid, Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Bogra and Governor-General Ghulam Mohammed. He won the release of hundreds of political prisoners. [8] A later Dawn column adds that the talks on provincial autonomy produced the start of an understanding that Ayub Khan's coup in 1958 sabotaged. [14]

One Unit and the National Awami Party

Wali Khan was with his father in the campaign against One Unit, the merger of West Pakistan's provinces, and was a founding member of the National Awami Party. Dawn dates the party to 1956; Ian Talbot dates it to 1957, and says it called for the dissolution of One Unit and a federal reorganisation. [7, 8] He became president of the NAP in June 1968, was arrested on 13 November that year and held in Montgomery and then Gujrat jails until March 1969. [8] Rehman puts his fight against One Unit and Ayub Khan's rule as the most glorious phase of his career, and says he was among the minority who opposed the army's operation in East Bengal in 1971. [9]

In the elections of 1970 Wali Khan won a seat in the National Assembly. [8] Talbot notes that the NAP was the most successful party in Balochistan's National Assembly seats, that its support there rested on the Marri, Bizenjo and Mengal tribes, that in the Frontier it came from the Yusufzai, and that the People's Party won one National Assembly seat in the Frontier, in the Mardan region. [7]

The two ministries, 1972 to 1973

The NAP and the JUI of Mufti Mahmud formed coalition governments in the Frontier and Balochistan in April 1972, under a tripartite accord with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's government signed on 6 March 1972. [15, 16] Dawn's historian says the centre did not fulfil many of its terms and interfered in provincial affairs, and that the NAP wanted only more provincial autonomy and less meddling. [15] Talbot adds that tension between the centre and the NAP-JUI ministry in Quetta grew after the Simla Accord of July 1972. [7]

Rehman writes that the opposition under Wali Khan's leadership contributed considerably to the 1973 Constitution, notably the adoption of the parliamentary system and some relief for the federating units, and that this was never fully recognised. On his death the interior minister, Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao, said the nation could not forget his role in framing it. [9, 12] Dawn records that he agreed to defer provincial subjects and an independent judiciary over transition periods of five and ten years, in return for hydel royalties for the Frontier and Balochistan, and that they differed over renaming the North-West Frontier Province. [16] He opposed Bhutto's wish to extend the Assembly's life to 14 August 1977. [17]

The dismissals of February 1973

The arms found at the Iraqi embassy in Islamabad on 10 February 1973 and the charges that followed ended the arrangement. The government said the weapons were meant for Baloch separatists. [7, 16] Dawn's account of the "London Plan" says that in September 1972 the information minister, Maulana Kausar Niazi, claimed that Wali Khan and the Balochistan leaders had hatched a plan in London with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to break Pakistan into semi-independent units, and that on 31 January 1973 the Baloch leader Akbar Bugti repeated the charge in Lahore. [15]

The Balochistan government was dismissed on 14 February 1973 and the Frontier ministry resigned in protest the next day. [15–17] Dawn counts 52 activists arrested, among them Mengal, Bizenjo, Khair Bakhsh Marri, Gul Khan Nasir and the poet Habib Jalib. [15] The NAP rejected the charge and said the story had been hatched by the interior minister, Abdul Qayyum Khan. According to Dawn, Mujibur Rahman told The Times the report was baseless. Dawn's historian concludes that the arms could not be tied to any group, that the National Assembly was not allowed to debate it, and offers as the plausible argument that Bhutto did not want NAP governments in two border provinces. [15] Talbot calls the arms discovery the pretext for the dismissal of the Mengal ministry, and quotes Lieutenant-General Gul Hassan Khan's memoir, which compares Bhutto's removal of the two ministries to the authoritarianism of any martial law era. [7] The insurgency in Balochistan that followed, Talbot writes, claimed at least 9,000 lives. [7]

Bhutto gave his reasons in the proclamation that removed the Balochistan ministry on 15 February 1973. On the reports reaching him, he wrote, the province's government had failed to check large-scale disturbances that cost lives and property on a massive scale, the province could not be governed under the Interim Constitution, and the national interest required the step. [4, 22] Addressing the National Assembly on 22 February, he said the arms at the Iraqi embassy were meant for use in Pakistan, and asked why, if they were for the Frontier or Balochistan, they had been brought to Islamabad. He said he had given the NAP its own governors and left its ministries alone, and that the two governors were removed because they ignored the central government's directives. [5]

Wali Khan called Bhutto another Hitler, according to Dawn. [18] On 28 February 1973 the NAP joined seven other parties in the United Democratic Front. [17]

Sherpao's murder, the ban and the Hyderabad case

On 8 February 1975 a bomb killed Hayat Mohammad Khan Sherpao, a founder of the People's Party and a former governor of the Frontier, at Peshawar University. Nobody claimed it. Dawn's historian writes that Bhutto, then in the United States, called his adviser Rafi Raza and asked him to have Wali Khan and the key NAP leaders arrested and to think of banning the party. [13] Wali Khan was arrested in Lahore that evening and the NAP was banned the next day or the day after: Dawn's profile says 9 February, a later column 10 February. [8, 13]

The Third Amendment to the constitution had widened what the state could call anti-national activity. A reference against the NAP went to the Supreme Court, which upheld the ban on 30 October 1975. [13] According to Dawn, the court held that the party was working for an independent Pakhtunistan and a Greater Balochistan at the cost of Pakistan's integrity. [14]

The government gave its own account of the ban. Its minister for provincial co-ordination, Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, said on 14 February 1975 that dissolving the party was "strictly in conformity with the provisions of the Constitution" and not arbitrary, that the declaration would go to the Supreme Court within four days, and that Sherpao had "stood like a rock between the integrity of Pakistan and its enemies". [23] Bhutto said on 21 March that the ban followed careful deliberation and that the NAP's anti-national activities were as old as Pakistan, since its leaders had bitterly opposed its creation. [24] Before the court, Attorney-General Yahya Bakhtiar argued that the party's real purpose was to destroy the concept on which Pakistan was created, and quoted a written statement by the NAP's Jam Saqi calling Pakistan "a multi-national State", a view he said Wali Khan shared. [25] The director-general of the ISI, Lt-Gen Ghulam Jilani, told the court that Wali Khan had returned from Kabul on 15 June 1974 with 20 saboteurs trained in a neighbouring country, and that his "Pakhtoonistan" would move the frontier from Torkham to the Margalla Hills. [26, 27] The court's amicus curiae, Zafar Mahmud, asked whether Wali Khan had meant only to rename the province; the general said he was serious about the larger plan. [27]

Wali Khan and about 80 others were then tried before a tribunal at Hyderabad on a charge of conspiring to break up Pakistan. [13] The trial opened on 10 May 1976 with a list of 455 prosecution witnesses. After 18 months only 22 had been called. Wali Khan had asked for a different bench, because two of its judges had been law secretaries and parties to the reference banning the NAP; the request was refused and he withdrew from the proceedings. He sent the tribunal a message: "My Lord, please arrange Aab-i-Hayat for us so that we … live till the completion of the proceedings of this trial." The tribunal said he should appear and apologise. [14] Another Dawn column says the prosecution lacked ample evidence and the proceedings stayed nearly dormant. [15] A CIA paper of March 1984 records that Wali Khan told American diplomats that Bhutto had ordered attempts on his life; that is his claim, and the paper does not test it. [3]

General Zia-ul-Haq took power on 5 July 1977, visited the jail, dropped the case and released the NAP leaders, on 7 December 1977 according to one Dawn column. [14] Another column says the detainees were freed only in 1979. [15] Rehman writes that history has still to judge what might have happened if Wali Khan had avoided trusting Zia's words in 1977, or had used his influence to save the accord of 1972. [9]

The Awami National Party

After the NAP was banned its followers formed the National Democratic Party under Sherbaz Khan Mazari, and Wali Khan became its president. [8] The CIA paper of 1984 calls the NDP the dominant party in the Frontier and names Wali Khan as its real leader and his wife, Nasim Wali Khan, as its effective leader in his absence. It adds that he was critical of Zia's Afghan policy and wanted direct negotiations with Kabul. [3]

In 1986 the NDP, the Awami Tehrik of Rasul Bakhsh Palejo and Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo's Pakistan National Party merged into the Awami National Party, with Wali Khan as first president, according to Talbot's glossary; the party split soon afterwards and kept its strength in the Frontier. [7] Dawn says he held the office for two terms of two years. [8] He sat again in the National Assembly in 1988. Rehman remembers the short ANP-PPP accord of 1988 to 1989. The ANP joined Nawaz Sharif's side in 1990 and 1997 and shared government in the province with the Muslim League. [7–9]

He lost his seat in 1990, to Maulana Hassan Jan, put up jointly by the People's Party and the JUI, and left active politics. Rehman counts that decision among his contributions to the country's political culture. Dawn adds that he kept his hold on the party through Nasim Wali Khan. [8, 9] His son Asfandyar Wali Khan later led the ANP. [8, 10] His brothers were the educationist Abdul Ali Khan and the poet Ghani Khan. [8]

Facts are Facts

Wali Khan's book is his version of the end of British India. He wrote in the preface that he had written it in solitary confinement under the Bhutto government, without reference books, and after one prison term under Bhutto he found secret papers in the India Office Library in London. [1] He argued from them that the British backed other movements to loosen Congress's hold, that the passes linking India with the Soviet Union made the Frontier a strategic concern, and that the Khudai Khidmatgar were "clobbered" because they would not follow British plans. [1] He did not think it necessary, he wrote, to tell readers his political point of view: "it is perfectly obvious". [1] The text was written in Pashto, translated into Urdu by Nasim and into English by Syeda Saiyidain Hameed; the preface is dated 12 July 1987 at Wali Bagh. [1]

On the referendum of July 1947 he gives the official figures, 289,244 for Pakistan and 2,874 for India out of 292,118 votes polled. He says the polling was rigged, that Muslim League workers and Aligarh students were brought in, and that the vote covered only six districts and left out the tribal areas and the princely states. [1] The Muslim League's side, and the official papers, are in the referendum article.

Pashtun identity and the Kalabagh dam

Talbot opens his history of Pakistan with Wali Khan's remark that he had been a Pushtun for 4,000 years, a Muslim for 1,400 years and a Pakistani for forty. Talbot took it from a lecture of 1990 and notes that in his 1976 submission to the Supreme Court Wali Khan had claimed to be a 6,000-year-old Pathan. [7] The number changed; the order did not. The CIA paper of 1984 calls him a long-time advocate of greater autonomy for Pushtunistan, "a murky term usually embracing the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan". [3] Dawn's historian leaves the question open: whether he wanted Pakhtunistan or backed a Greater Balochistan, the column says, he was a democratic and social leader who struggled for autonomy inside the federation. [14]

The ANP's campaign against the Kalabagh dam on the Indus came after his retirement. In September 2003 the ANP held a seminar in Peshawar with nationalists from Sindh, Balochistan and the Frontier. Speakers said the dam would damage the Frontier's five central districts by raising the water table and defeating salinity projects, and proposed the Bhasha dam instead. [19] Nasim Wali Khan, as the ANP's provincial president, announced rallies in the districts, and in October she called the dam an anti-Pukhtun project that, Dawn reports her as saying, would be built over the dead bodies of the Pukhtun community. [20, 21]

Death and burial

Wali Khan was moved to Peshawar on the Monday after a stroke and died there on Thursday 26 January 2006, of a heart attack at 7:11 in the morning, aged 89. [10] His body lay at Jinnah Park in Peshawar, where thousands came, and the funeral was held there on Friday 27 January. [10, 11] Delegations came from India and Afghanistan, among them the Afghan vice-president Karim Khalili and the former president Burhanuddin Rabbani. [10, 11] Dawn's first report says he would be buried in his ancestral graveyard at Utmanzai, and its report of the funeral says he was buried at Wali Bagh, his house in Charsadda. [10, 11]

President Pervez Musharraf called him a man whose life was based on principles and convictions, and Nawaz Sharif noted that he had never joined an unconstitutional set-up. [12] Rehman wrote that his tragedy, and that of the people of Pakistan, was to have struggled all his life for the causes the state was created to defend. [9] Begum Nasim Wali Khan called him "my partner, my political mentor, my role model and my leader". [10]