Babra, 12 August 1948: the shooting of the Khudai Khidmatgar at Charsadda

At a glance

• On 12 August 1948, in the village of Babra (also written Babara, Babrra) in Charsadda, the police of the Frontier's Muslim League government fired on a Khudai Khidmatgar gathering. [2, 3]

• The provincial government gave 15 dead and about 50 wounded. Khudai Khidmatgar sources and the press that doubted the communiqué gave figures from about 150 to more than 600. [2–4]

• The government said the crowd had defied a ban on gatherings and attacked the police. The Khudai Khidmatgar and Bacha Khan said an orderly procession, with women carrying copies of the Qur'an, was fired on without warning. [2, 3]

• The dead of Babra are remembered in Pashtun politics and in the Pakistani press as martyrs, and 12 August is marked there every year. [2, 5, 6]

• A month later the Khudai Khidmatgar was banned and its headquarters at Sardaryab was seized. [2]

The weeks before

The Khudai Khidmatgar, the "Servants of God" founded by Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Bacha Khan, had lost the provincial government a year earlier. Abdul Qayyum Khan led the Frontier ministry from August 1947 after Dr Khan Sahib's Congress ministry was dismissed, and the movement became the opposition. [2] Syed Minhaj ul Hassan, a historian who wrote a book on Qayyum Khan's ministry from police diaries, assembly records and newspapers, gives the sequence of 1948. [2]

On 15 June 1948 Abdul Ghaffar Khan was arrested near Bahadur Khel in Kohat. The charge was that he had tried to create disturbances and had joined the agents of the Faqir of Ipi, and the district magistrate sentenced him under the Frontier Crimes Regulation to three years of rigorous imprisonment. [2] Tendulkar, his Indian biographer, adds that the trial was held in a rest-house at Banda Daud Shah and that Abdul Ghaffar refused to defend himself or to give security. [3] In his own autobiography Abdul Ghaffar says the Islamic government of Pakistan treated the Khudai Khidmatgar more cruelly than the British had. [1]

More arrests followed. His son Wali Khan was arrested with him, Tendulkar says, [3] and on 5 July his other son Abdul Ghani Khan and other leaders were arrested. [2] On 8 July the governor, Sir Ambrose Dundas, issued the North-West Frontier Province Public Safety Ordinance, which let the provincial government arrest and deport people and banned rallies and processions. [2] Hassan reports that the national press criticised it, and that only one Peshawar paper welcomed it. [2] Qayyum Khan's defence was that the Khudai Khidmatgar were agents of the Hindus and worked against the state. [2] The Khudai Khidmatgar answered that they had broken no law. They said the government was labelling its opponents "anti-state, anti-Islam and traitors". [2]

Hassan records a secret meeting at Sardaryab on 2 July 1948, attended by Dr Khan Sahib and Ghani Khan. It resolved that speakers in meetings and hujras should demand Shariat law, the unconditional release of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the lifting of the ban on meetings and processions, the return of the Red Shirt newspaper and the freeing of the arrested workers. [2] The police reported that the Khudai Khidmatgar planned a demonstration at Babra after Eid, to press the government to enforce Shariat law. [2]

The march and the firing

The sources agree on the place and the date. They differ on almost everything else.

The provincial government's account, as Hassan quotes the Special Branch diary and the communiqué, is this. Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code had been imposed on 5 August for Prang, Charsadda and Babra, so the gathering was illegal. The Red Shirts, men, women and children, assembled in large numbers on an open field. Some men in plain clothes were reported to be armed. The assistant commissioner put the crowd at 10,000; the officer writing the diary put it at about 5,000. The assistant commissioner was stoned, and someone fired at him. The crowd then "advanced towards the police in a very excited way", and the police were ordered to open fire, which stopped when the crowd dispersed. [2]

The Khudai Khidmatgar account comes through Abdul Wali Khan, who took it from Salar Amin Jan Khan, the chief organiser of the Babra gathering, in Hassan's summary. Hidayatullah Khan, the deputy commissioner, had told Amin Jan that he had not imposed Section 144. The police and militia closed the roads to Charsadda, searched everyone and arrested men found in red uniform. Even so, thousands reached Prang and Babra and began a procession, moving in formation with red flags. Their slogans included "Pakistan Zindabad" and "Shariat-i-Quran Zindabad", Hassan notes from the police diary. They meant to reach the Babra graveyard by the mosque of Ghazi Gul Baba. At the mosque the police and militia fired from the rooftops without warning. Women came out with copies of the Qur'an on their heads to stop the firing, and the Qur'ans were hit. [2]

Abdul Ghaffar Khan's own account is printed by Tendulkar. The Khudai Khidmatgar were to assemble at Charsadda for the Friday prayer, to pray for their imprisoned comrades and to ask for their release. They came in an orderly procession led by an old man, and the women carried copies of the Qur'an on their heads. The mosque stood on a rise and Qayyum Khan had troops in it. When the procession reached the foot of the rise, machine-gun fire opened. The commander ordered the marchers to lie down, and they were shot as they lay. The survivors were beaten, told that they had no right to pray because they were "Hindus", and made to endure public humiliation. [3] In his autobiography he describes the same scene in fewer words, as men and women with the Qur'an on their heads going to Friday prayers. [1]

The reasons given for the gathering also differ. Hassan's police sources say the Khudai Khidmatgar meant to picket the courts and to press for Shariat law. [2] Bacha Khan says they went to pray for the prisoners and to ask for their release. [3] The Awami National Party's speakers, reported by Dawn in 2021 and 2022, say they protested the arrest of Abdul Ghaffar Khan and other leaders and the removal of the elected government of Dr Khan Sahib. [5, 6]

The damage to the Qur'ans is also disputed. Salar Amin Jan said he had seen the damaged copies himself, and the area officer of Charsadda said that no one had verified it. [2]

How many died

No count was made in the open. Hassan writes that most of the dead and wounded were carried away for fear of the police, who were arresting even the wounded. [2] The figures that survive are these.

• The provincial government's communiqué: about 15 killed and about 50 wounded. A later police diary gave 20 killed and 25 wounded. [2]

• The Calcutta Morning News of 19 August 1948, citing the Tribune's correspondent: 300 killed and 400 to 500 wounded. [2]

• An eyewitness quoted by Tendulkar: about 150 killed and 400 wounded. [3]

• Another eyewitness, who according to Tendulkar swore on the Qur'an: two thousand dead. Tendulkar himself says only that the true number "must have run into hundreds". [3]

• Khudai Khidmatgar sources through Wali Khan: more than 600. [2]

• Khan Shehram Eusufzye, writing in The News on Sunday in 2018: 600 Khudai Khidmatgar killed, with unofficial accounts higher than the official count. [4]

Hassan adds that the Khudai Khidmatgar sources say the police impounded vehicles carrying the wounded and that many were refused treatment in hospital. [2] Eusufzye says all hospitals were told not to take in the injured. [4] In March 1954 Bacha Khan asked the provincial assembly for a tribunal to look into the "massacre, arson and loot" at Charsadda. [4]

What the police and the government did next

Hassan describes the measures taken at a meeting in the chief minister's office the day after the firing. A punitive police force of three platoons was stationed at Charsadda. A fine of Rs 50,000 was imposed on the Red Shirts to pay for it; at the end of August Hassan finds it imposed on selected Red Shirts of Charsadda, and the same amount on those of Mardan. [2] All lorry permits of the Red Shirts were cancelled, arms licences were banned in the Charsadda area, and in Charsadda, Babra and Prang people had to stay indoors between 9.30 in the evening and 5 in the morning. [2] Under the Public Safety Ordinance the government forfeited the property, except residential houses, of Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his sons Wali and Ghani. [2] Dr Khan Sahib was arrested in August and held for three months. [2] Salar Amin Jan, the organiser, was arrested on 17 August. [2]

Hassan reports that police raids on Khudai Khidmatgar houses in Charsadda and Swabi, with Muslim League National Guards alongside, left houses looted and families humiliated. He quotes a CID report of men being forced to walk through Prang in public, which the same report said people disliked and the Senior Superintendent of Police ordered stopped. [2] Qayyum Khan, speaking on Independence Day in Peshawar, praised the men who had suppressed the Red Shirts at Babra, called Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Faqir of Ipi anti-state, and said that the Pir of Manki Sharif and his agents had joined the Babra disturbances. [2]

Hassan also gives the pressure on ordinary Khudai Khidmatgar to change sides. A letter of the Chief Secretary of 29 July 1948 laid down the policy of arresting those leaders and workers who would not come to terms and not releasing them soon. After Babra the police made men apologise and join the Muslim League, and the Civil and Military Gazette ran the heading "600 Afridi Red Shirts join League". [2] The League itself suspected the converts: at a meeting on 20 August the Red Shirts of one village decided to sign the League form but to vote for their Congress candidates at the elections. [2]

On 15 September the governor declared the Khudai Khidmatgar and its young men's wing, the Zalmai Pakhtun, unlawful, and seized its headquarters at Sardaryab with its lands. [2] Some mullahs sided with the government. According to a police diary quoted by Hassan, Indar Mullah of Shabqadar told a crowd that the Babra dead should not be buried in a Muslim cemetery because they had risen against an Islamic government. [2] The villagers had by then buried the dead in their own clothes, as martyrs, Hassan writes. [2]

What people said then

Hassan reports that in Peshawar the general reaction was disapproval. People said the Red Shirts' demands were genuine, that this was the second time they had been fired on, first by the British in 1930 and now by a Muslim government, and that the official toll was too low. Hazara was the one district where people approved. [2] Some Muslim Leaguers criticised the ordinance too, among them Samin Jan Khan of Mardan at a meeting in Peshawar on 9 August. [2] The first anniversary of independence fell two days after the firing and the newspapers printed the official communiqué. [2, 4]

Qayyum Khan defended the police in the assembly. Hassan quotes him as saying: "I had imposed section 144 at Babara. When the people did not disperse, then firing was opened on them." [2] Eusufzye gives a longer version, dated September 1948, in which the chief minister adds that the police had run out of ammunition and that the government "would not have cared" if the crowd had been killed. [4] Hassan, who takes the shorter text from a Pashto memoir of Abad Khan, does not print that last clause. [2]

Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who led the Jinnah Awami League, called the firing "worse than that of Jallianwalla Bagh". [2] Eusufzye places the remark at a rally in Dacca in July 1950, and Hassan cites a Lahore newspaper of 20 November 1951. [2, 4] In India, Prime Minister Nehru told the Constituent Assembly on 19 March 1949 that the Khudai Khidmatgar had been subjected to intense repression and their leaders to treatment one would not expect any government to give. Tendulkar prints his words. [3]

Qayyum Khan's reputation divided with the event. Hassan writes that his political opponents "loved to loath and label him as the 'butcher of Babarah'", while thousands of his followers praised his services to the Pakistan movement. [2] Even his harshest critics, Hassan adds, recognised his giving the province the University of Peshawar. [2]

Remembered in verse and on 12 August

The Charsadda poet Abdul Malik Fida wrote of the shooting in a poem that moved Bacha Khan to tears; the whole poem is given in Abdul Malik Fida, and the movement's other writers are in Poets of the Khudai Khidmatgar. Tendulkar says that in July 1955, after his release, Bacha Khan went to Babra and prayed for the Khudai Khidmatgar killed in the firing. The villagers welcomed him warmly, and a piece on the "Babra massacre" by Fida was recited. In Tendulkar's English it includes the line "Tarry awhile O Death, I come to embrace you." [3]

Tendulkar noted that one of the biggest graveyards of the area lay beside the village. [3] Eusufzye writes that the episode was passed on in folklore after it dropped from national memory, because two days after it Pakistan celebrated its first independence anniversary. [4] The Awami National Party, the successor of the Khudai Khidmatgar tradition under Bacha Khan's son Khan Abdul Wali Khan, keeps 12 August. In 2021 its provincial president Aimal Wali Khan laid a floral wreath at the graves at Babra, promised that the party would reopen the case after coming to power, and tied it to Takkar, Qissa Khwani and the killings of party leaders. [5] In 2022 the party's Swat chapter held a ceremony for the "martyrs of Babara". [6] Dawn reports both events as the party's, and the party's speakers are the source of what the reports say about the number and the cause. [5, 6]

The earlier shooting the Peshawar crowds recalled in 1948 is told in the Qissa Khwani massacre of 1930. Eusufzye, writing in 2018, sees the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement as the same tradition resurfacing, again committed to non-violent protest. [4] The wider history of the year is in Partition and the 1947 Frontier referendum, and the place is described in Charsadda and Hashtnagar.