The militant anti-British Red Shirt Movement, an…
1930 CE
The militant anti-British Red Shirt Movement, an amalgam of pan-Islamism and Indian nationalism, is the byname of Khudai Khitmatgar (Persian: "Servants of God"), an action in support of the Indian National Congress started by Abdul Ghaffar Khan of the North-West Frontier Province of India in 1930.
A Pashtun who greatly admires Mahatma Gandhi and his nonviolent principles, Ghaffar Khan views support for the Congress as a way of pressing his grievances against the British frontier regime.
Known as the Frontier Gandhi, his followers are pledged to nonviolence, and derive their popular title from the red color of their shirts.
Khan had drawn his first recruits from the young men who had graduated from his schools.
Trained and uniformed, they serve behind their officers and file out into various villages to seek recruits.
They began by wearing a simple white overshirt, but the white was soon dirtied.
A couple of men had their shirts dyed at the local tannery, and the brick-red color proved a breakthrough, it is this distinctive color that earned the Khudai khidmatgar movement activists the name "the Red shirts" or surkh posh.
Ghaffar Khan is arrested on April 23, 1930, after giving a speech in Utmanzai urging resistance to the British occupation.
Ghaffar Khan's reputation for uncompromising integrity and commitment to nonviolence inspire most of the local townspeople to take the oath of membership and join the Khudai Khidmatgar in protest.
After other Khudai Khidmatgar leaders are arrested, a large crowd of the group gathers at the Qissa Khwani bazaar (the Storytellers Market) in Peshawar.
As British troops move into the bazaar, the crowd is loud, though completely nonviolent.
British armored cars drive into the square at high speed, killing several people.
The crowd continues their commitment to nonviolence, offering to disperse if they could gather their dead and injured, and if British troops leave the square.
The British troops refuse to leave, so the protesters remain with the dead and injured.
At this point, the British order troops to open fire with machine guns on the unarmed crowd.
The Khudai Khidmatgar members willingly face bullets, responding without violence.
Instead, many members repeat 'God is Great' and clutch the Qur'an as they go to their death.
This is the first major confrontation between British troops and nonviolent demonstrators in the peaceful city—some estimates at the time put the death toll from the shooting at nearly four hundred dead.
The exact number of deaths remains controversial—several hundred killed, with many more wounded.
One British Indian Army regiment, troops of the renowned Royal Garhwal Rifles, refused to fire at the crowds.
A British civil servant wrote later that "hardly any regiment of the Indian Army won greater glory in the Great War than the Garhwal Rifles, and the defection of part of the regiment sent shock waves through India, of apprehension to some, of exultation to others."
The entire platoon is arrested and many receive heavy penalties, including life imprisonment.
The troops continued hunting the Peshawarites indiscriminately for six hours.
A defining moment in the nonviolent struggle to drive the British out of India, the gunning down of unarmed people triggers protests across the subcontinent and catapults the newly formed Khudai Khidmatgar movement onto the National scene.
This results in King George VI (Emperor of India) launching a legal investigation into this matter.
The British Commission brings the case forward to Chief Justice Naimatullah Chaudhry, a distinguished Judge of the Lucknow protectorate.
Chaudhry personally surveys the area of massacre and publishes a two hundred-page report criticizing the British and passes a resolution in favor of the local people of Peshawar and N.W.F.P Area.
The decision of the judge is hailed by the local populace upon the basis that truth and honesty has prevailed.
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