“The Forbidden Land”: The British, Frontier Nationalism, and Congress, 1931–1934

Abstract

On Christmas Eve 1931, Indian Police battalions, accompanied by units of the Indian Army and the Royal Air Force, entered Peshawar and all other urban centers of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in order to arrest the leadership of the regional nationalist movement. By Christmas morning the leader of the Khudai Khidmatgars, or the “Red Shirts” as the British referred to them, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, his brother, Dr. Khan Sahib, and a number of other nationalist leaders had been detained and deported from the province on a special train. Meanwhile, military columns spread throughout the NWFP, marching at night, and rounding up entire villages in dawn raids.1 These raids, carried out on a day which, as the then Deputy Commissioner for Peshawar, Olaf Caroe, put it, “nobody, however suspicious, would expect a British authority to proceed to stringent action,” constituted the first salvo in a two-year campaign of attrition against the nationalist movement in the province.2