The “Khudai Khidmatgar” (Servants of God) was founded by –
- (a)Shaukat Ali
- (b)Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan
- (c)M. A. Jinnah
- (d)M. A. Ansari
Correct — B, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan.
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan founded the Khudai Khidmatgar in 1929 in the North-West Frontier Province, and it grew into the frontier's principal non-violent volunteer organisation. Recruits took an oath binding them to service and to non-violence, wore a uniform, drilled, and worked on village reform as much as on political agitation.
Ghaffar Khan had been building towards it for most of a decade: the Anjuman-i-Islah-ul-Afaghina, which he started in 1921, ran schools and social-reform work in the frontier villages, and the Khudai Khidmatgar took that base and gave it political direction, allying with the Congress through the Civil Disobedience years.
The idea to carry away is the pairing of a person with a region and a method. Ghaffar Khan is the frontier, and the frontier's contribution to the national movement was not armed tribal resistance, which is what the province's reputation would lead you to expect, but a disciplined non-violent corps.
That inversion is the whole point of the organisation, and it is why Ghaffar Khan is remembered as the Frontier Gandhi. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1987, and after his death in 1988 he was buried, as he had asked, at Jalalabad in Afghanistan.
- (a)Shaukat Ali — Shaukat Ali belongs to a different movement and a different decade of activity. With his younger brother Mohammad Ali Jauhar he led the Khilafat agitation from 1919, working through the Khilafat Committee and in alliance with Gandhi during Non-Cooperation.
He is the right answer to a question about the Ali Brothers and the leadership of the Khilafat movement. He had no part in raising the frontier volunteer corps, which was Ghaffar Khan's own organisation built out of his village work in the North-West Frontier Province.
- (c)M. A. Jinnah — Jinnah led the Muslim League and is the right answer to items on the Fourteen Points of 1929, framed as his reply to the Nehru Report, or on the League's demand for Pakistan.
Placing him here is the reverse of the historical relationship: the Khudai Khidmatgars stood with the Congress, opposed the League's partition demand, and boycotted the 1947 referendum in the North-West Frontier Province because it offered a choice between India and Pakistan but no option for the Pashtun future they wanted.
Ghaffar Khan and Jinnah were on opposite sides of that argument, not on the same side of a founding.
- (d)M. A. Ansari — Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari was a Delhi-based physician and Congress leader, active in the Khilafat movement, one of the group of founders associated with Jamia Millia Islamia, and the president of the Congress at its Madras session in 1927.
He is the right answer to a question on who presided over that session. His work was in Delhi and in the Congress's national leadership, not in the frontier, and he founded no volunteer corps.
The Khudai Khidmatgar, meaning Servants of God, was a mass volunteer organisation founded by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in 1929 in the North-West Frontier Province.
Its members took an oath of non-violence and of service, wore a brick-red uniform that earned them the popular name Red Shirts, and combined political agitation with village-level social work. The organisation aligned itself with the Indian National Congress and supplied the frontier's participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement.
Ghaffar Khan, called Bacha Khan or Badshah Khan by his followers and the Frontier Gandhi in the wider nationalist press, had begun with schools and reform work through the Anjuman-i-Islah-ul-Afaghina from 1921 and also ran a Pashto-language journal, Pakhtun.
The frontier is where the national movement's claim to be a non-violent mass movement was tested in the least likely setting.
A province with a reputation for armed tribal politics produced a large body of volunteers who accepted beatings and firing without retaliating, which is why the Khudai Khidmatgar matters out of proportion to its size. For a Uttarakhand paper there is a second thread.
On 23 April 1930, when Khudai Khidmatgar and other demonstrators filled the Qissa Khwani Bazaar in Peshawar, soldiers of the Royal Garhwal Rifles under Chandra Singh Garhwali refused the order to fire on the unarmed crowd.
The men were court-martialled and imprisoned, and Chandra Singh Garhwali went on to become a figure in Garhwal's own political life.
The Peshawar episode is the point at which frontier history and Uttarakhand history meet, and it is the reason a candidate preparing for this commission cannot treat the Khudai Khidmatgar as somebody else's regional topic.
- Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan founded the Khudai Khidmatgar in the North-West Frontier Province: launched in 1929, formally organised by 1930, so 1929 is the year to carry but a source giving 1930 is not contradicting it.
- Members were popularly called Red Shirts, or Surkh Posh, from the brick-red colour of their uniform shirts; the colour carried no communist meaning.
- Volunteers took an oath committing them to non-violence and to service, and the organisation worked with the Indian National Congress during the Civil Disobedience Movement.
- Ghaffar Khan had earlier founded the Anjuman-i-Islah-ul-Afaghina in 1921 for schools and social reform in the frontier villages.
- On 23 April 1930, soldiers of the Royal Garhwal Rifles led by Chandra Singh Garhwali refused to fire on unarmed demonstrators at Qissa Khwani Bazaar, Peshawar, and were court-martialled.
- Ghaffar Khan's elder brother, Dr Khan Sahib, headed the Congress ministry in the North-West Frontier Province.
- The Khudai Khidmatgars opposed partition and boycotted the 1947 referendum in the North-West Frontier Province.
- Ghaffar Khan was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1987; he died in 1988 and was buried at Jalalabad in Afghanistan.
- The Servants of India Society is a separate body with a similar-sounding name, founded by Gopal Krishna Gokhale at Pune in 1905.
The stem glosses the name as Servants of God. The gloss translates Khudai Khidmatgar; it is not a pointer to Gokhale's Servants of India Society.
- Reading the gloss 'Servants of God' and reaching for Gokhale, because the Servants of India Society is the organisation whose name a candidate has drilled. The gloss is a translation of Khudai Khidmatgar and has nothing to do with Gokhale's society.
- Treating Red Shirts as a communist label and therefore ruling Ghaffar Khan out or looking for a leftist founder. The shirts were dyed brick-red for a cheap uniform colour, and the movement's programme was non-violent and nationalist.
- Assuming that any prominent Muslim leader of the 1920s is interchangeable, and picking Jinnah or Ansari because both are familiar names from the same decade. Each of the three wrong names attaches to a specific movement and a specific place, and the frontier belongs to Ghaffar Khan alone among them.
- Confusing Ghaffar Khan with his elder brother Dr Khan Sahib, who led the Congress ministry in the province. The ministry is the brother; the volunteer corps is Ghaffar Khan.
- Losing the Uttarakhand link by filing this as national history only, and then not being able to place which unit refused to fire at Peshawar in 1930.
Two shapes are visible in this question's citable set. The plainest asks who founded it, with the options being contemporaries from the same decade, which is what this UKPSC item does; NDA_GAT_2022_I_Q123 asks the same fact but keeps the founder in easier company.
The second drops the Pashto name and uses the nickname instead, asking what the Red Shirts called for, which is UPSC_2002_GS1_Q123, so that a candidate who memorised only the founder's name still has to know the movement's aims.
Knowing the founder alone covers only the first of those, so the preparation to do is founder, province, nickname and method together -
and, for a candidate sitting an Uttarakhand paper, the Peshawar firing of 23 April 1930 and the Royal Garhwal Rifles' refusal, which is the part of this story that is also Uttarakhand's own history.
NDA_GAT_2022_I_Q1232022The same fact, asked in almost the same words, and keyed to the same man. What differs is the company he is kept in: the NDA item surrounds Ghaffar Khan with Mahatma Gandhi and Madan Mohan Malaviya, so a candidate can arrive at the answer by eliminating two figures whose organisations everyone knows. This UKPSC version replaces them with Shaukat Ali and M. A. Ansari, contemporaries of Ghaffar Khan from the same religious community and the same decade of activity, which removes the elimination route and forces positive recall of who the frontier belongs to. Worth attempting in that order to see how much of a supposedly known fact was really being carried by weak options.
UPSC_2002_GS1_Q1232002The same organisation, but the question is about its aims rather than its founder, and it approaches through the nickname Red Shirts instead of the Pashto name. A candidate who can answer this UKPSC item still has to know that the Khudai Khidmatgars stood for Pathan regional nationalist unity and struggle against colonialism, and has to reject the tempting communist reading that the word 'Red' invites. Taken together, these two items cover the pairing they split between them: who founded it, and what it was for.
RPSC_2023_PRE_Prelims2023_Q1412023Not the same organisation and not a shared fact; the link is the naming confusion that this stem sets up. Because the UKPSC stem glosses Khudai Khidmatgar as 'Servants of God', a candidate can slide towards Gokhale's Servants of India Society, which is what the RPSC item is about and which was founded at Pune in 1905, a quarter-century earlier and in a completely different political tradition. Reading the two side by side is the cheapest way to stop the two 'Servants' names from ever occupying the same slot in memory again.
- practice - not a real PYQ
The Khudai Khidmatgar volunteers were popularly known as the 'Red Shirts' because
- (a)they had adopted the political programme of the Communist International
- (b)the uniform shirts worn by the volunteers were dyed a brick-red colour
- (c)they demanded a red flag for the North-West Frontier Province
- (d)they were funded and armed by the Soviet Union across the frontier
Answerb - The name came from the appearance of the uniform: the volunteers' shirts were dyed a brick-red colour, and the Pashto name Surkh Posh means the same thing.Option (a) fails because the movement's programme was non-violent and nationalist, tied to the Congress, and had no Comintern connection. Option (c) fails because the organisation's demands concerned the frontier's place in the freedom struggle and later its constitutional future, not a provincial flag.
Option (d) fails because the Khudai Khidmatgars were unarmed by oath, which is the single most distinctive thing about them, so an arms-supply explanation contradicts the movement's defining rule.
- practice - not a real PYQ
The Khudai Khidmatgar movement led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan had its base in
- (a)Sindh
- (b)Baluchistan
- (c)the North-West Frontier Province
- (d)the Punjab
Answerc - Ghaffar Khan built the organisation among the Pashtuns of the North-West Frontier Province, and its best-known episodes, including the Peshawar events of April 1930, took place there.Sindh in (a) was the setting of a separate provincial politics and, later, of the Hur rebellion of 1941-43, not of the Khudai Khidmatgars. Baluchistan in (b) is a neighbouring province with its own leadership, most prominently Abdus Samad Khan Achakzai, and was not where the volunteer corps was raised.
The Punjab in (d) is where the Unionist Party and, in the same period, the Akali and Ghadar strands of politics ran, and it is the better-known north-western province, which is what makes it a substitute worth ruling out deliberately rather than by feel.
- practice - not a real PYQ
In April 1930, soldiers of the Royal Garhwal Rifles under Chandra Singh Garhwali refused the order to fire on unarmed demonstrators at
- (a)Qissa Khwani Bazaar, Peshawar
- (b)Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar
- (c)Chauri Chaura, Gorakhpur
- (d)the Dharasana Salt Works, Gujarat
Answera - The refusal took place at Qissa Khwani Bazaar in Peshawar on 23 April 1930, during the Civil Disobedience Movement, and the soldiers were court-martialled for it. Jallianwala Bagh in (b) is 1919 and is the opposite case, since there the troops did open fire on a trapped crowd.Chauri Chaura in (c) is February 1922 and is remembered for a crowd burning a police station, which led Gandhi to withdraw Non-Cooperation, so no army unit and no refusal is involved.
Dharasana in (d) saw the salt-works raid of May 1930 in which police beat satyagrahis, again a case of force being used rather than refused, and in a different province altogether.
- practice - not a real PYQ
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was awarded the Bharat Ratna in the year
- (a)1980
- (b)1987
- (c)1990
- (d)1992
Answerb - Ghaffar Khan received the Bharat Ratna in 1987, in his lifetime; he died in January 1988. The other years are all real award years for other recipients and are therefore plausible-looking rather than empty fillers:1990 in (c) is the year of B. R. Ambedkar's posthumous award and of Nelson Mandela's, 1992 in (d) is the year of J. R. D. Tata's and Satyajit Ray's, and 1980 in (a) is the year of Mother Teresa's. Only 1987 attaches to Ghaffar Khan.