The Phoenix: Bacha Khan.

Symbolism plays no less a role than actual historical events even though such allegorical events may occur after history has given its verdict and injunctions. Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his son Abdul Wali Khan, came to Islamabad in January 2023, not virtually but in the proverbial sense, to accolades of the nation for their contribution, to whatever extent was possible given their circumstances, to a cohesive, plural, liberal and welfare-based country.

Whether one calls it poetic justice or historical nemesis it was no less emblematic that the Bacha Khan Conference on 28-29th January 2023 was being celebrated at a time when there couldn't be a greater need for abjuring of intolerance and violence in politics and furthering the cause of inclusive national pluralism and acceptance of regional realities of our polity, aspirations and goals that were central to the beliefs of the father and son. But more symbolic perhaps was the fact that Bacha Khan, at last, was being hailed, albeit too late, as the champion of unity, peace and progress in a convention centre named after the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The Quaid, a pragmatic constitutionalist believing in the worth of negotiations, had his heart in the right place when he met Ghaffar Khan. The subsequent follow-up couldn't materialize due to self-centered spoilers.

On his 35th anniversary and on the 17th of his son, Wali Khan, who most of their living lives suffered for being suspected of loyalty, were at last allowed to be acclaimed in no other place than Jinnah Convention Center, Islamabad, a centre named after a person during whose period, perhaps on other's persuasion, the provincial government of NWFP, led by Dr Khan Sahib, brother of Bacha Khan was dismissed on 26th Aug, 1947 on grounds of suspected allegiance.

Bacha Khan had taken an oath of fealty as a member of the constituent assembly but those who wanted to impose their own exclusively myopic concept of nationhood on Pakistan could not do without constructing and devising ideologies and personalities that did not pose a threat to their own ephemeral supremacy. An enemy had to be created.

Of the 35 years or so during which he survived in a free Pakistan, twenty of those were spent by Ghaffar Khan in prison. Despite his oath of fidelity to the new country, notwithstanding the Afghan irredentist claims over territories that formed part of Afghanistan upto the early 19th century, extending upto river Indus, he was not allowed...