Khudai Khidmatgar, a voluntary organisation, was established by which of the following leaders of India?

Correct — B. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan founded the Khudai Khidmatgar, the Servants of God, in 1929 in the North-West Frontier Province.

It was a non-violent volunteer corps recruited among Pathans, known as the Red Shirts from the brick-red uniforms its members wore.

It worked alongside the Congress and took the heaviest repression at Peshawar in April 1930, during the Civil Disobedience Movement.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Muhammad Ali Jinnah — Muhammad Ali Jinnah led the Muslim League and the demand for Pakistan — a politics the Khudai Khidmatgars opposed, since Ghaffar Khan stood with the Congress against partition.
• (c)
  Maulana Muhammad Ali — Maulana Muhammad Ali was a leader of the Khilafat Movement with his brother Shaukat Ali, and edited the newspaper Comrade. He had no hand in the Frontier volunteer corps.
• (d)
  Hakim Ajmal Khan — Hakim Ajmal Khan was a Unani physician who helped found Jamia Millia Islamia and presided over the Congress session of 1921. His work lay in Delhi, not on the Frontier.

The Khudai Khidmatgar matters because it was a mass non-violent organisation built far outside the Hindi heartland, among a people the colonial state had labelled martial.

Ghaffar Khan — Badshah Khan at home, the Frontier Gandhi to the rest of India — recruited volunteers who took an oath of non-violence, wore a uniform, drilled, and ran schools and social reform beside their political work.

That discipline is what made it dangerous to the government: an unarmed but organised force in the province the Raj treated as its most sensitive frontier.

Key facts

• Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan founded the Khudai Khidmatgar in 1929 in the North-West Frontier Province.
• Its members were called the Red Shirts, Surkh Posh, after their uniform.
• The Khudai Khidmatgars were fired on at Qissa Khwani Bazaar, Peshawar, in April 1930.
• Ghaffar Khan received the Bharat Ratna in 1987, the first person who was not an Indian citizen to be awarded it.

Common traps

• Picking a Muslim leader by name recognition instead of by region, when the Khudai Khidmatgar is a Frontier organisation.
• Confusing Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar with Muhammad Ali Jinnah on a list that carries both names.
• Dating the organisation to the Non-Cooperation years rather than to 1929.

No directly related past PYQ was found.