Gold a nd Gunson the Pa tha n Frontier ByAb dul Qa iyum B.Sc. (Econ.) London Ba rrister AtLa w M.L.A, (Centra l) 1945 ReproducedBy Sa niH.Pa nhw a r (2018) CONTENTS DEDICATION .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 1 PREFACE .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 2 I. PHYICAL OUTLINESOF THEPATHANHOMELANDS .. .. 3 II. THEFRONTIER CARAVANTHROUGH THE AGES .. .. 6 III. THEPEOPLE .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 13 IV. THERISE OFTHEFREEDOM MOVEMENT .. .. .. .. 21 V. SOME PRESENT-DAY PERSONALITIES .. .. .. .. 33 VI. THEFORWARD POLICY ATWORK INTHETRIBALBELT .. 39 VII. THEECONOMIC BACKGROUND .. .. .. .. .. 48 VIII. THESHAPEOFTHINGS TO COME .. .. .. .. .. 56 A POST-SCRIPT .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 61 DEDICATION To DOCTOR KHAN SAHIB for hisunc ea sing fighta ga inst c orruption in pub lic lifea nd in pub lic serv ic esthisb ook is respec tfullydedic a ted. GoldandGunsonthePathanFrontier: Copyright © www.sanipanhwar.com 1 PREFACE For some time past some friends have repeatedly asked me to write a short book about the N.W.F.P. and the Tribal Belt. Owing to my manifold activities—political, legislative and legal, Ihave not beenableto write as early as Iwished to. In this rather short book, I have tried to give the broad outlines of certain aspects of the Frontier problem. There is a short history of the Province; something about its people and some leading personalities; the rise of the Khudai Khidmatgars, who represent the freedom movement; the problem of the Tribal areas, the economic background; and the shape of things to come. To my mind, the problem of the Pathan North-West is mainly economic. Force and bribery have failed to bring us any nearer to a solution. What is needed is an entirely different approach to the subject. The Pathans are a people who wish only to be allowed to live in their own way. They have been misunderstood. Not only that, but for a very long time their case has been deliberately misrepresented by interested parties. They have no desire to dominate others. It is equally clear that they will never submit to dictation or discrimination of any kind from any quarter. If this little book encourages people in. India and abroad to understand the Pathan problem by helping them to view it in the right perspective, I shall feel that my labors have not been invain. ABDULQAIYUM NewDelhi 31st March 1945 GoldandGunsonthePathanFrontier: Copyright © www.sanipanhwar.com 2 CHAPTER I PHYSICAL OUTLINES OF THE PATHAN HOMELANDS The Frontier Province, and the Tribal Belt between it and the Durand Line have been something of a mystery to people in India till the thirties of the present century. Until then all this area was a sealed book. The Indian people could only know what the Political Department of the Government of India wanted them to know. Stories of murders here and there, or tales of Frontier expeditions now and again, attracted some attention. But beyond this, very little was known. It was round about 1930 that the stirrings of a new life became evident in the N.W.F.P., and the shroud of mystery was rent asunder. With the advent of Reforms in 1932, the peoples' point of view saw the light of day for the first time. It was then that the Indian people realized, that there was another side to this picture, and that all was not well with the doings of the political officersin the north-west. It would not be proper to study the problems of this area against the narrow background of the province comprising six settled districts — Peshawar, Mardan, Hazara, Kohat, Bannu, and Dera Ismail Khan. It would be equally undesirable to confine one's attention to parts of the great Tribal Belt now covered by the Agencies of Malakand (which includes the three States of Chitral, Dir and Swat), the Khyber, Kurram, North and South Waziristan, and others—administered by the Deputy Commissioners of the settled districts. If we look back at history we find that this area was but apart of thebiggerarea covered bywhat is calledHindustan andAfghanistan. The Indian frontiers extended to the Hindu Kush and beyond in the hoary past when Ashoka ruled; and also when the great Moglull dynasty ruled over a vast empire from Delhi—the Imperial Capital. The North-Western Frontier extends from the Sulaiman Mountains and the Gomal Pass in the south, to Chitral and the Pamirs in the north. The British Tribal Belt covers the area between the administrative boundary, that is, the foothills and the Durand Line as far as Kashmir, afterwhich KashmirState is the eastern boundary. The Tribal Belt covers an area of 24,986 sq. miles, with an estimated population of 2,377,599. The area of the settled districts is 14,263 sq. miles, and the population 3,038,067. These figures are from the latest cams report of 1941, According to it the total population of the Province and the Tribal Belt is 5,415,666. The figures for the Tribal GoldandGunsonthePathanFrontier: Copyright © www.sanipanhwar.com 3 area are neither very accurate nor exhaustive. Some estimates place the population of the TribalBeltalone atabout three anda halfmillion. The N.W.F.P. and its Agencies form an irregular strip of country lying north-east by south-west between the parallels of 31° 4' and 36° 57' North latitude, and 69° 16' and 74° 7' East longitude; its extreme length is 408 miles and extreme breadth 279 miles. On the north it is shut off from the Pamirs by the Hindu Kush Mountains. On the south it is bounded by.Baluchistan and theDera GhaziKhan district, on the east by KashmirState and the Punjab, and on the west by Afghanistan. The cultivable area of the Province is 67.5 percent,but the net cultivated areaisonly 39.2percent. The bulk of this land is covered by mountains with narrow valleys in between. The plains extend between the Indus and the foothills on the west, and cover the Peshawar, Mardan, Bannu, and Dera Ismail Khan districts, and the cis-Indus plain of Haripur. Of these the Peshawar, Mardan, Haripur, and Bannu plains are extremely fertile. The valleys beyond the foothills are watered by springs, or else by hill streams. Some of these valleys, like the Kurram and the Swat, are extremely beautiful and fertile—with green paddy fields on either side of the Swat and Kurram rivers which run through them. The Peshawar and Mardan plains are also very fertile. A well-established irrigation system, comprising canals and water-courses, helps to irrigate this fertile plain. Wheat and sugarcane are the two principal crops and very good rice is also grown. But the fame of this plain rests on the excellent fruits that are grown in abundance—wonderful peaches and plums, luscious grapes of different kinds; pears and oranges. In fact it would not be wrong to say that the whole area is one vast orchard which can very largely satisfy the demand of the Indian home market. The Government Experimental Farm at Tarnab, about nine miles from Peshawar, has done wonders in developing this fruit industry by giving expert advice, by supplying new varieties of fruit trees, and by spreading the knowledge of fruit culture in the valley. The Haripur plain is well-known for its excellent apricots, and in the mountain uplands of Hazata, Swat, Tirah and the Kurram, apples,walnutsand pears of different kinds abound. The climate varies from season to season and between the hills and plains. In the plains it is very hot in the summer, pleasant in the spring and autumn, and very cold in the winter. In the upland regions the summers are delightfully cool and the winters are very very cold, with snowfalls in December and January. There are some delightful hill stations like Abbotabad,Nathia Galiand ParaChinar. Such, in brief outline, is the land of the Pathans, who are the dominant race in the Province and the ruling race in the Tribal Belt. As stated at the outset, it would be an entirely wrong approach, to treat this area as if it stood detached from Hindustan and Afghanistan with which it has been intimately connected since the dawn of history. The GoldandGunsonthePathanFrontier: Copyright © www.sanipanhwar.com 4 Indus on the east forms the ethnographical boundary of the Pathans or the Afghans.But this virile and manly race is not confined to the area with which this book deals. It occupies all that part of Afghanistan which stretches up to the great Hindu Kush range, and also the part of Baluchistan between Quetta and the Gomal known as the Zhob Agency. GoldandGunsonthePathanFrontier: Copyright © www.sanipanhwar.com 5 CHAPTER II THE FRONTIER CARAVAN THROUGH THE AGES The land of the Pathans has played a very important part throughout the long course of history. Through it lead the Passes the Khyber, the Gomal, the Tochi, to mention the principal ones only—through which the Aryan hordes poured into India, driving the Dravidians andthe aboriginal tribesbeforethem. Through the self-same passes have passed armies of Tartars, Mongols, Turks, Iranians and Afghans, either to colonize or to found empires at Delhi and beyond. It would be true to say that before the advent of the European races generally, and the British in particular, made India vulnerable from the sea, and more recently when our eastern frontier was threatened by Japan, all the invasions of India had been from the north- west. From the ninth century onwards, each of these invaders brought with them a new religion, an entirely new social code, a different type of art and architecture—in fact an entirely new conception of life. They brought about tremendous changes in our social and political system, our outlook on life, and our very conceptions of values. The newcomers fighting their way through the: passes and the valleys of the north-west, were always, in the first instance, bound for the Indus, and the 'Land of the Five Rivers' which we now call the Punjab. From there they advanced to the. Jamuna and the Ganges as far east as Bengal and Assam. Other waves swept past Delhi into Central India, and past the Vindhyas into the uplands of the south, that is the Deccan, and founded kingdoms which very often lasted for centuries. They penetrated even to the far distant south. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam have in turn claimed spiritual allegiance from these fighting men of the north. The remains of numerous Buddhist stupas and monasteries scattered all over this area bear testimony to the spiritual hold which the religion ofthe great Gautama onceenjoyed over theentireregion. In the fifth century B.C., Darius the Persian Monarch invaded and conquered the country round Kabul and that bordering on the Indus. Two centuries later the same hills and valleys witnessed the hosts of Alexander treading their way through to the Jhelum and beyond. Alexander came through Herat and overran the valleys and plains on the Afghan side of the Oxus. He marched on Kabul. The Khyber was then, as it is even now, held by that warlike clan of 'Aparoetae' as the Greeks called them, and whom we now call the Afridis. Avoiding the Khyber Pass, Alexander crossed the Kabul river near Jalalabad and by way of the Konar Valley entered the Yusufzai Plain, that is, Swat State and the Malakand Agency. He then headed for the river Indus, which he crossed near Amb. The little chieftains round about the Indus joined him and he advanced on the Jhelum, where he met anddefeated the armies of the brave Raja Porus. He then continued his march to the Sutlej or the Hyphasis, but his men were becoming GoldandGunsonthePathanFrontier: Copyright © www.sanipanhwar.com 6 weary of this long, never-ending march. There he cried halt and turned back with his hosts to Babylon,where hearrivedin325B.C. The next landmark is the advent of the great Ashoka. He carried the confines of his kingdom to the river Krishna in the south, and the borders of Bactriain the north, about 267 B.C. This was the time when Buddhism was in the ascendant and held sway, spiritual as well as temporal over the Frontier and Afghanistan. Numerous ruins of Buddhist monasteries stupas and even settlements abound from the Indus right up to the Hindu Kush. The wanderings of Chinese pilgrims shed a good deal of light on the happenings in the Indus region and beyond. They came to pay their homage at Buddhist shrines, particularly at the shrine containing the ashes of the Buddha in the Kanishka Stupa outside Peshawar. The first to arrive was Fa-Hian, in the fifth century. The better-known Hivan Tsang followed him a couple of centuries later. We are told that a number of Graeco-Bactrian states flourished on both sides of the Indus at this time. They have left us numerous coins which have been found in large numbers in the recent archaeological discoveries. Even now if you go from Malakand up the Swat Valley, you will notice a number of Buddhist remains. Some of the stone carvings are of exquisite beauty.These Graeco-Bactrian kingdoms lingeredon fora century ortwo. The Frontier tract, it seems, was either Hindu or Buddhist down to the seventh century A.D. Tartars and Aryans, Hindus and Buddhists were during this long period struggling, with varying fortunes, for supremacy over Afghanistan and the Frontier, and eachin turn heldsway overthis region. The new faith of Islam had taken birth in Arabia, and in an incredibly short time the Holy Prophet had transformed an ignorant race of nomads steeped through and through in superstition, and constantly at war with one another, into a race of scientists, thinkers, writers and world-conquerors. Soon the Muslim hosts were on the march, fired with a wonderful zeal to carry the message of Islam to the four corners of the world—the message of the unity of God and the absolute equality of man. The Eastern Roman Empire and the Empire of Iran collapsed before it like a house of cards. The Muslim armies were in Kabul by A.D. 644 and by 711 Mohammad Bin-i-Qasim had invaded the province of Sindh. Soon after, Afghanistan and the Frontier were converted to Islam, and there followed a series of invasions of Hindustan which have completely altered and put an altogether new face on the history of India. By A.D. 977 Subaktagin, the Turkish slave king of Balkh and Ghazni, initiated a series of invasions of India. The Frontier tribes embraced Islam and eagerly joined the invading armies. Thereafter followed Mahmud of Ghazni and a succession of invading War Lords from the north who overran the whole of India, and foundeddynasties that ruled India for centuries. It will be observed that throughout this period the Frontier and. Afghanistan and almost the whole of Northern India formed one Empire. In 1526 Babar crossed the Indus and marching on Delhi, defeated the armies of Ibrahim Lodi and founded the Moghul GoldandGunsonthePathanFrontier: Copyright © www.sanipanhwar.com 7