Wisdom of the Worlds

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Unfinished Pashtun Question To understand the present condition of Pashtuns in Pakistan, one must return to the life and marginalization of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a man whose vision for his people was systematically sidelined, and whose absence still echoes in their political and social reality. Bacha Khan did not imagine Pashtuns as a peripheral community defined by conflict. He imagined them as a self-aware, educated, ethically grounded society, capable of shaping its own destiny through discipline rather than violence. At a time when the Pashtun belt was caricatured as irredeemably tribal, he founded schools, mobilized communities, and redefined courage as restraint. His Khudai Khidmatgar movement was not merely anti-colonial; it was civilizational in ambition, aiming to transform Pashtun society from within. Yet, after 1947, the trajectory of Pashtun history diverged sharply from Bacha Khan’s ideals. The new Pakistani state, anxious about cohesion and legitimacy, viewed Bacha Khan less as a national asset and more as a political inconvenience. His insistence on provincial autonomy, cultural dignity, and democratic participation clashed with a state structure that increasingly centralized power and privileged security over citizenship. As a result, he spent much of Pakistan’s early decades imprisoned, surveilled, or politically isolated. In sidelining him, the state also sidelined the vision he represented. The consequences of that exclusion are visible today. Modern Pashtuns, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, inhabit a paradox. They have contributed disproportionately to Pakistan’s defense, labor force, and regional stability, yet remain underrepresented in decision-making, underinvested in development, and overexposed to conflict. Decades of militarization, proxy wars, and counterterror operations have reshaped their homeland into a strategic frontier rather than a social landscape. Schools were replaced by checkpoints; civic leadership by security administration. Bacha Khan foresaw this danger. He warned that a people denied education and political agency would eventually be reduced to instruments rather than citizens. His emphasis on non-violence was not moral naïveté but strategic foresight: he understood that violence, once normalized, would consume both the state and society. Had his ideas been embraced rather than suppressed, Pashtun life today might look markedly different. An education-first approach could have produced a generation of professionals instead of refugees. A politics of dignity could have nurtured trust between the state and its peripheries. Most importantly, Pashtuns might have been seen not as a problem to be managed, but as partners in nation-building. Instead, the vacuum left by Bacha Khan’s exclusion was filled by forces he explicitly opposed: extremism, authoritarianism, and the erosion of civic culture. Where he sought to dismantle the myth that Pashtuns understand only force, the state inadvertently reinforced it by engaging the region almost exclusively through coercive frameworks. This is why Bacha Khan’s relevance today is not symbolic but urgent. For a generation of Pashtuns growing up amid economic precarity and political disillusionment, he offers an alternative lineage — one rooted in self-respect without separatism, resistance without nihilism, and identity without hostility. He demonstrates that Pashtun honor is compatible with pluralism, and that strength need not be measured in weapons or wars endured. The tragedy is not merely that Bacha Khan was marginalized. It is that Pakistan marginalized a future it could have had — one where Pashtuns were uplifted through schools rather than sacrificed to strategy, where dissent was engaged rather than imprisoned, and where unity was built through consent rather than control. In revisiting Bacha Khan today, we are not indulging in nostalgia. We are confronting a historical fork in the road — and recognizing that many of the crises faced by Pashtuns now are the direct outcome of paths not taken. His life asks a difficult question of the present: What does a state lose when it silences its most ethical voices — and what does a people lose when their most visionary leader is denied the chance to shape their future? For Pashtuns, that loss is not abstract. It is lived, daily, in the distance between what they are — and what they were once promised they could become.

The Sun is just a star, not a Hindu god.

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One more thing. Our 10 minute delivery promise is enabled by the density of stores around your homes. It’s not enabled by asking delivery partners to drive fast. Delivery partners don’t even have a timer on their app to indicate what was the original time promised to the customer. After you place your order on Blinkit, it is picked and packed within 2.5 minutes. And then the rider drives an average of under 2kms in about 8 minutes. That's an average of 15kmph. I understand why everybody thinks why 10 minutes must be risking lives, because it is indeed hard to imagine the sheer complexity of the system design which enables quick deliveries. Also, if you've ever wanted to know why millions of Indians voluntarily take up platform work and sometimes even prefer it to regular jobs, JUST ASK any rider partner when you get your next food or grocery order. You will be humbled by how rational and honest they will be with you. Having said that, no system is perfect, and we are all for making it better than today. However, it is far from what it is being portrayed on social media by people who don't understand how our system works and why. If I were outside the system, I would also believe that gig workers are being exploited, but that's not true.