Ajmal Khattak: Pashto poet, National Awami Party leader and exile in Kabul

At a glance

• Ajmal Khattak (اجمل خټک) was a Pashto poet and politician born at Akora Khattak, in Nowshera district, on 15 September 1925 by most accounts. Dawn's news report of his death gives 1926. [3, 4]

• He joined Bacha Khan's Khudai Khidmatgar movement and the Quit India movement as a schoolboy, and later edited newspapers and wrote radio scripts. [3, 6]

• His first collection, Da Ghairat Chagha (د غېرت چغه, "The Cry of Honour"), was banned in Pakistan and Afghanistan. [3, 4]

• He was secretary-general of the National Awami Party (NAP) and organised the stage at the Liaquat Bagh rally of 23 March 1973. After it he lived in exile in Kabul until 1989. [4, 5, 9]

• He was elected to the National Assembly in 1990, became a senator in 1994, and led the Awami National Party (ANP) through the 1990s. In 2000 he fell out with it over his meetings with General Pervez Musharraf. [4, 14, 17]

• He died on 7 February 2010 and was buried at Akora Khattak. [4, 6]

A boy from Akora Khattak

Akora Khattak is the village of Khushal Khan Khattak, and Dawn's anniversary report in 2026 describes Ajmal Khattak as growing up "immersed in Pakhtun heritage" there. [10] Dawn's obituary gives his birth as 15 September 1925, which agrees with the age of 85 in its news report; that report, however, prints 15 September 1926. [3, 4]

The obituary says the Khudai Khidmatgar movement of Bacha Khan made a deep impression on him as a boy, and that he joined the Quit India movement. [3] The accounts do not agree on his age. Dawn's report on the second anniversary quotes the ANP leader Afrasiab Khattak saying he joined the Bacha Khan movement at 17, and the Business Recorder obituary says he joined Quit India at 15. [7, 11] For the movement itself see Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar.

Politics cost him his schooling. Dawn says he was forced to leave school because of his activity, then finished his education privately and took a master's degree in Persian at the University of Peshawar. [3] During school holidays his cousin Mohammad Umar took him to Fatehpur, where he studied in a religious seminary, and Dawn adds that he later met Sajjad Zaheer, Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hasan Manto, Prem Chand and Surjeet Singh. [3] The same obituary says his first poem appeared in the magazine Pakhtun in 1944. [3]

Editor, scriptwriter and progressive

Khattak worked as an editor on a run of Pashto and Urdu papers. Dawn's obituary names Shahbaz, Adal, Anjaam, Rahbar and Bang-i-Harum, and says he wrote scripts for Pakistan Broadcasting in Peshawar for five years. [3] The funeral report spells three of the titles Anjam, Adl and Rahbar. [6]

His creed was set out in his own words. Dawn quotes him telling a literary meeting in the early 1960s that Pashtun writers should "forget about praising rosy cheeks, locks of black hair and fairy tales", and says he held that view to his death. [3] He named Khushal Khan Khattak, Ferdowsi, Saadi, Khayyam, Shakespeare and Voltaire as poets remembered because they gave their nations a new vision, and the obituary lists Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Sahir Ludhianvi among those he admired. [3]

He did not shed older loyalties. The obituary gives this line from him: "Khushhal Khan Khattak is in my blood, Marxism is in my mind, while Islam is in my heart." [3] Dawn's tribute "A life lived well" called his written work that of "a committed Marxist-Leninist", and a journalist's news report said that like many poets of the subcontinent he was influenced by the Russian Revolution. [4, 5] For the older line of Pashto verse he set himself against and drew on, see Pashto literature and oral poetry.

The Cry of Honour

Da Ghairat Chagha is the book he is remembered for. Dawn's obituary dates the first collection to 1958 and says it was banned in both Pakistan and Afghanistan "because it challenged the status quo", and that it ultimately landed him in prison. [3] The anniversary reports repeat the 1958 date. [8] A 2019 article in Pashto, the Pashto Academy's journal at Peshawar, cites its own edition: University Book Agency, Peshawar, dated 6 April 1957. [2] Whether that is the same first edition cannot be settled from either text, so 1957 and 1958 both stand in print.

Dawn's report on the 2026 relaunch of the book describes it as 199 pages and quotes the politician Mian Iftikhar Hussain's claim that "most young people in the early 70s had learnt the entire book by heart". [8] The poet Sadiq Zarrak, who brought out the new edition, named its themes as resistance, nationalism, humanism, love of homeland and revolutionary fervour, close to the warrior-poet tradition of Khushal Khan. [8] Advocate Akbar Hoti picked out one image, which Dawn reports in his paraphrase: even if the oppressors silence the tongue, the voice grows louder, "like a flute sweetened by sharpening". [8] The obituary says the book became "the bible of Pushto resistance poetry" and earned him the title Baba-i-Nazm. [3]

The poems did not stay on the page. Dawn's news report says the poems about the exploitation of peasants and other oppressed people were sung at meetings of progressive parties, and the tribute said they were still sung in 2010. [4, 5]

The later books named in Dawn's reports are Gul auo Perhar (flower and ember), Batoor, Guloona Takaloona (flowers and thorns), Da Wakht Chagha (the cry of time), Da Afghan Nang, Kachkol, Zhwand au Fan and Qisa Zama da Adabi Zhwand, as well as Jalawatan ki Shairi, poetry of exile, which the news report calls an Urdu collection. [4, 10] The obituary counts 18 books. [3] The 2026 anniversary report adds an Urdu history of Pashto literature and a book on national democratic movements in Pakistan. [10] Dawn spells several titles differently in different pieces, and the transliterations here are Dawn's.

The party and the stage at Liaquat Bagh

In 1969 Khattak became secretary-general of the National Awami Party, according to a speaker quoted in Dawn in 2020, who also says he lost the 1970 election in his home constituency to Abdul Haq. [9] Dawn's 2010 news report says he became general secretary in 1973; Dawn does not reconcile the two. [4] NAP's leader was Khan Abdul Wali Khan, Bacha Khan's son.

The events that decided his life began in February 1973. After Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto dismissed the Balochistan government on 14 February, the Frontier government resigned the next day in protest. [12] On 28 February eight parties, NAP among them, formed the United Democratic Front. [12] It called a public meeting at Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi on 23 March. [12] Dawn's 2010 report says Khattak was organiser of the front and stage secretary of the meeting, and that shots were fired at the leaders, including Wali Khan. [4]

Dawn recorded two contemporary accounts of what happened. The newspaper's special representative wrote on 24 March that the official toll was seven dead and 75 hurt, then nine, after clashes between the ruling party's workers and the front's volunteers. [13] An official handout accused the opposition, especially NAP and the Pakhtoon Zalme, and opposition spokesmen blamed workers of the People's Party. [13] Dawn's later retrospective says the organisers accused Bhutto's Federal Security Force of firing indiscriminately and that most of the dead were NAP workers; it counts a dozen killed. [12]

Exile in Kabul, 1973 to 1989

Dawn's tribute says that as a prominent figure in NAP he was wanted by the Federal Security Force, and went into self-imposed exile in Afghanistan in 1973. [5] None of the Dawn pieces names a charge against him. They give the reason as the crackdown on the party. Bhutto's government later banned NAP after the assassination of the People's Party leader Hayat Mohammad Khan Sherpao; Wali Khan was suspected of involvement and sent to Sahiwal jail. [14]

The government of the day did name grounds, though not a charge. On 23 June 1973 the interior minister, Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan, told the National Assembly that it had received reliable information that Ajmal Khattak was in Kabul and engaged in anti-Pakistan activities, that he had attended a reception at the Bangladesh embassy there and had secretly visited some countries, and that he was proposing to set up a government in exile. [20] After the ban on the NAP, a Foreign Office spokesman said on 16 February 1975 that Afghanistan had given asylum to "Pakistani absconders from justice" and cited Khattak, a former secretary general of the party, as the man "directing this campaign of terrorism from Kabul". [21] In July 1975 the director-general of the ISI told the Supreme Court that his files covered the activities of workers of the "Revolutionary Front of Mr. Ajmal Khattak", and that they held maps and a plan of training camps set up in a neighbouring country by Khattak. [22] The general claimed privilege over the files, so Dawn's report gives only his description of them.

In Afghanistan, Dawn says, the government of President Sardar Daud Khan gave him the status of a state guest, and he kept cordial relations with later Afghan governments through the Soviet war. [4] The American embassy in Kabul reported on 23 February 1975 that it had spoken that week with "Ajmal Khattak, the Pushtunistan leader in exile". [1] In the same telegram the Afghan deputy foreign minister, Waheed Abdullah, said his government had no territorial claim on Pakistan and wanted only the Pashtuns and Baloch to obtain their rights under Pakistan's constitution. [1] The telegram is an American diplomat's account, and its label for Khattak is the embassy's, not his. For the wider story of Kabul in those years, see the Soviet war and the refugees.

Exile gave him a poetry of its own. In the foreword to Guloona Takaloona, quoted in the Pashto Academy's journal, he writes that on 14 December 1980 he went from Kabul to Czechoslovakia for treatment, entered a clinic in Prague, and walked in the hospital garden alone with his thoughts of home, village, country and people, and that poems began to come to him. [2] Wherever he travelled in Eastern Europe afterwards, he says, new scenes gave him new poems. [2]

The length of the exile is given differently. Dawn's 2010 report has him leave after Liaquat Bagh and return in 1989; its second-anniversary report says 17 years; its 2026 report says 16 years, though it places them "during the 1980s". [4, 10, 11] The dates 1973 to 1989 give 16.

Return and the Awami National Party

He ended the exile in 1989 when the ANP, NAP's successor, made an electoral alliance with the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI). [5] Dawn's news report says he was given a warm welcome. [4] The ANP itself had come out of NAP in 1986 under Wali Khan. [14] Khattak was elected to the National Assembly from Nowshera in 1990 and became a senator in 1994. [4]

When Wali Khan stepped back, Dawn's explainer on the party says the leadership "switched" to Khattak, who led it through the 1990s. [14] A report of January 2002 says he was president for two consecutive terms. [17] The Business Recorder obituary says he headed the party twice and sat in parliament twice, as a member of the National Assembly and then as a senator, yet died in the same partly furnished three-room village house in which he had lived most of his life. [7] Dawn's funeral report quotes the minister Bashir Bilour calling it a three-marla house. [6]

The break with the party, 2000 to 2003

Dawn's accounts of the split share a core and differ on details. The obituary says that in 2000 the ANP leadership asked him to explain his closeness to General Musharraf, and that he answered in a poem which signalled his withdrawal. [3] The party explainer says he left after the coup over differences arising from his meetings with Musharraf and his endorsement of Musharraf's policies. [14] A January 2002 report says he launched his own National Awami Party Pakistan (NAPP) after those differences; supporters of his new party said that Azam Hoti of the ANP had admitted in talks that expelling him was unwise. [17]

The 2002 election went badly for both. After the ANP's defeat in October, Khattak went unexpectedly to Wali Bagh and met Wali Khan, Begum Nasim Wali Khan and Asfandyar Wali Khan for three hours. [15] Asfandyar, who resigned as central president of the ANP, said Khattak was "like a father to him"; Khattak said all the differences and bitterness had been removed, and the two parties agreed to work towards a merger. [15] Five days later Khattak told newsmen that his party was not merging and that unity among Pashtuns came first. [16] In March 2003 the NWFP chapter of NAPP expelled him as central president for the October defeat and for pursuing a merger with the ANP, a step he said it had no power to take. [18] Dawn's explainer says the ANP "won back the loyalty" of Khattak, who rejoined before retiring from politics. [14]

The obituary adds that in 2006 he declined the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, a presidential award, rather than take it from "a dictator's hand". [3] Dawn's news report says he received the Kamal-i-Fun award in 2008. [4]

Death and the mausoleum

Ajmal Khattak died at about 85 on the night of Sunday 7 February 2010 after a long illness, in Nowshera by Dawn's news report; one Dawn obituary prints 8 February. [3, 4] He had told Dawn from a hospital bed the year before: "what is being done against the Pakhtuns troubles me more than my illness." [4]

Thousands attended his funeral at Akora Khattak on Monday despite heavy rain, and he was buried in the ancestral graveyard. [6] The ANP leader Asfandyar Wali Khan announced three days of mourning. [4] He left a wife, three sons, Aimal Khan, Mir Wais and Jamal Khattak, and two daughters. [6]

A mausoleum was being built at the grave. On the night of 9 May 2012 it was blown up, and a second explosion an hour later injured 12 people who had gathered there, among them two policemen and two journalists. [19] Police told Dawn that about 5 kg of explosives had been used and that they suspected the Taliban, who had blown up shrines and mosques before. [19]

How he is read now

Dawn has reported meetings on his death anniversary in 2012, 2020 and 2026. At the 2026 meeting in Peshawar a speaker described him as a revolutionary poet and nationalist who "faced imprisonment, 16 years exile in Afghanistan during the 1980s". [9–11] At the 2020 meeting speakers said he gave Pashto poetry and political vision a new direction. [9]

Scholars of Pashto are looking at the other side of his work. Nasrullah Khan and Tufail Ahmad Zaryab Yousafzai argue in Pashto that though he is called above all a revolutionary, progressive and national poet, his verse is also full of love. [2] They show it in ghazals of the cupbearer, the preacher and the sheikh, and quote the critic Hanif Khalil saying Guloona Takaloona is mostly in the ghazal form and blends romance with purpose. [2] They add that the Persian ghazal brought that wine-house imagery into Pashto, and that Khattak used it in his own way. [2]

He was, the Business Recorder wrote at his death, "a stranger to the place called Pakistani politics". [7] His own verdict, from the obituary, was that politics had been an aberration and that "I would have better served my people through my poetic work". [3]