Which one of the following publications was started by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in 1928?

Correct — A, (a) Pakhtun. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan started the monthly Pakhtun in May 1928, and it was printed in Pashto — which is the point of it. He had spent the 1920s trying to build a movement of reform and self-respect among the Pashtuns of the North-West Frontier, beginning with the Azad schools and the society for the reform of the Afghans that he set up early in the decade, and a journal in the people’s own language was the natural next instrument: it carried the argument for education, for the abandonment of blood feuds and for political awakening to a readership no Urdu or English paper reached. Two years later that groundwork produced the Khudai Khidmatgar, the non-violent volunteer movement whose members wore red and whose discipline under fire in 1930 astonished the rest of India. The trap in the option list is that all four entries look like publication titles, and one of them is the name of the movement rather than of a paper. Sorting them out is a matter of holding the two words apart: Pakhtun is what Ghaffar Khan published from 1928, Khudai Khidmatgar is what he organised from 1929, and the man himself is remembered as Badshah Khan or Bacha Khan, and in the rest of India as the Frontier Gandhi.

Why the others are wrong

• (b)Khudai Khidmatgar — This is the organisation, not the publication, and it comes a year later. The Khudai Khidmatgar — Servants of God — was founded in November 1929 as a non-violent volunteer corps among the Pashtuns; its members were called Red Shirts from their uniform, it grew to a membership counted in tens of thousands, and it worked in close alliance with the Congress through the 1930s. Naming it here is the single most productive distractor in the set, because a candidate who remembers only that Ghaffar Khan is associated with the words Khudai Khidmatgar will choose it without asking whether those words name a paper.
• (c)Young India — Young India was Gandhiji’s English weekly, not Ghaffar Khan’s. Gandhi took it over in 1919 and wrote in it until it ceased in 1931, using it together with the Gujarati Navajivan as his main means of addressing the country; his later paper, Harijan, began in 1933. The date in the stem is a further check: the question asks for a publication started in 1928, and Young India was already nine years into Gandhi’s editorship by then.
• (d)India Awakens — No publication of the national movement went by this name, and it is included as plausible-sounding filler. Titles in this field were either vernacular words with a political charge — Pakhtun, Kesari, Kirti, Al-Hilal — or plain English phrases already in circulation, and a candidate who cannot place a title at all should treat that as evidence against it rather than as a gap in his own reading.

The vernacular press is one of the load-bearing structures of the national movement, and questions of this type are really about the pairing of an editor with a title and a language. The pattern is consistent across regions: a leader who wants to reach a population beyond the English-educated few starts a paper in the local language and uses it to build an organisation. Tilak had Kesari in Marathi and Maratha in English; Abul Kalam Azad had Al-Hilal in Urdu; the Ghadar movement had its paper in Punjabi, Urdu and other languages; the Punjab communists had Kirti; and Ghaffar Khan had Pakhtun in Pashto. The frontier case is the sharpest illustration of why language mattered, because the Pashtun districts had almost no reach for papers published from Lahore or Delhi, and because the British administration treated the frontier as a security zone in which political organisation was suppressed more readily than elsewhere. A journal, schools and a volunteer corps were the three instruments Ghaffar Khan used, in that order.

Key facts

• Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan founded the monthly journal Pakhtun in May 1928; it was published in Pashto.
• He founded the Khudai Khidmatgar, or Servants of God, in November 1929; its members were known as the Red Shirts and the movement was avowedly non-violent.
• Earlier in the 1920s he had opened Azad schools in the frontier districts and organised a society for reform among the Pashtuns.
• He is known as Badshah Khan or Bacha Khan, and was called the Frontier Gandhi elsewhere in India.
• The Khudai Khidmatgar worked in alliance with the Indian National Congress through the 1930s.
• Young India was the English weekly Gandhi edited from 1919 until it ceased in 1931; Navajivan was its Gujarati companion and Harijan began in 1933.
• Vernacular journalism was the standard instrument of political organisation in this period — Kesari in Marathi, Al-Hilal in Urdu, Kirti in Punjab, Pakhtun in Pashto.

Common traps

• Choosing the name of an organisation from a list of titles because it is the phrase most strongly associated with the person.
• Ignoring the year printed in the stem, which by itself rules out a paper that was already established well before 1928.
• Assuming a title in English must belong to a national leader. The frontier journal was in Pashto, and its title is a Pashto word.
• Picking an unfamiliar title on the reasoning that it must be the obscure right answer. Here the unfamiliar title is the invented one.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Khudai Khidmatgar movement founded in 1929 among the Pashtuns is associated with which leader?

  • (a)Khan Abdul Qayyum Khan
  • (b)Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
  • (c)Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan
  • (d)Maulana Abul Kalam Azad

  Answer(b) Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In which language was the journal Pakhtun, started in 1928, published?

  • (a)Urdu
  • (b)Persian
  • (c)Pashto
  • (d)Punjabi

  Answer(c) Pashto