How the ‘ethnological monstrosity’ came into being
The Treaty of Gandamak was signed on 26 May 1879 between Amir Mohammad Yaqub Khan and the government of British India in the middle of the Second Afghan War under duress. Under the treaty the Afghan ruler ceded various frontier areas to Britain to prevent the invasion of further areas of the country
Salman Bangash examines the reasons that led the British to set up the tribal belt, now called FATA, and the purpose it was meant to serve. He probes the issue in the context of the British imperial policy towards India.
India being the jewel in the British crown, its defence enjoyed second priority after the defence of the British homeland. In early nineteenth century the threat of invasion came from France while in the late 19th and early 20th century it came from imperial Russia, which was fast expanding its power in Central Asia.
Between Russia and British India stood Afghanistan. The British fought two bloody wars to occupy and subjugate the country but failed. The country thus became a sensitive buffer between imperial Russia and British India.
The tribal belt on India’s North West Frontier assumed considerable political and geographic importance for the British. But as Bangash notes, “British policy towards the tribal belt was demonstrably and patently incoherent, inconsistent, and impulsive.”
The book contains brief notes on a number of related subjects. It deals with the topography, ethnography, and geo-strategic significance of the tribal belt. It briefly touches upon British Frontier policy and the genesis and implications of the European imperialism. It probes the structure of tribal administration and takes snapshots of the several wars fought by the British in the tribal area. Most important of all, the book puts into perspective some of the burning issues of today that include the Durand Line and the FCR.
But first of all the Treaty of Gandamak.
The Treaty of Gandamak was signed on 26 May 1879 between Amir Mohammad Yaqub Khan and the government of British India in the middle of the Second Afghan War under duress. Under the treaty the Afghan ruler ceded various frontier areas to Britain to prevent the invasion of further areas of the country.
The Treaty made the Afghan Amir a feudatory of the British Crown. It also allowed the British to take control of the strategic passes. Yaqub Khan had to leave Afghanistan for good because the treaty was unacceptable to the Afghans. He finally decided to settle in Simla along with his family which migrated to Pakistan after 1947.
A section of Pushtun nationalists use the ceding of the territory under duress to claim, as PKMA party chief Mahmood Khan Achakzai has done, that the Pushtuns from Afghanistan have a right to cross over and live on this side of the border. A somewhat similar position is taken by JUI-F chief Fazlur Rehman. The claim is however hotly contested by the Baloch who think this a ploy to turn them into a minority in Balochistan. Chief Minister KP Pervez Khattak too has challenged Achakzai’s claim saying that KP became a part of Pakistan through a referendum.
The issue of Durand Line is also hotly debated whenever differences arise between the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Successive Afghan governments have refused to accept the Line as the international border. By allowing free movement of the so called mujahideen across the Pak-Afghan border Ziaul Haq also compromised the position taken since 1947 by successive Pakistani administrations that the Durand Line is an international border. The recent clash between border forces of the two countries at Torkhum was ignited by the strong and contradictory positions taken on the issue by the neighbouring countries.
The British considered the Durand Line as a scientific border between Afghanistan and British India.
The creation of the Durand Line was necessitated by Russian advance in Central Asia towards the closing decades of the 19th century. The advance led to fears about a possible war between two imperial powers. Afghanistan, it was maintained, was for India what the British channel was for Great Britain. To rush forces to Afghanistan in the event of a Russian attack, the British had to make use of the mountain passes controlled by independent and hostile tribes. It was decided to bring the tribal region under some sort of control.
What stood in the way were the ambitions of the Afghan ruler Amir Abdur Rehman who also claimed suzerainty over the tribal belt. The idea of drawing a boundary between British India and Afghanistan was resisted by the Amir. Abdur Rehman initially declined to hold talks over the issue. This led to pressures from the British. The Viceroy ordered the withholding of the Amir’s latest shipment of guns and ammunition till he agreed to receive the British delegation led by Mortimer Durand.
In 1893 the Afghans were coerced into signing an agreement on the boundary. As the line ran remorselessly through ‘homes, villages, fields, common lands, grazing grounds and divided tribes and even families’ it was called by a critic ‘ethnological monstrosity’.
To manage the areas on this side of the Durand Line effectively a separate province was carved out of Punjab in 1901 and names NWFP. It was rechristened as Khyber Pukhtunkhwa during the last PPP tenure.
In 1901, the British enforced the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) in tribal areas. The FCR is a black law which has continued to stay after the independence. Based on the primitive concept of collective responsibility, the law holds the entire tribe responsible for the crime committed by a member of the tribe. In the Musharraf era the FCR was used to punish tribes for the activities of individual terrorists.
According to Bangash the FCR was meant to counter the fierce opposition of the Pukhtun tribes to British rule and protect British interests in the region.
“FCR was notorious for its penalties. These include the power to blockade hostile or unfriendly tribes (section 21); demolition and restriction or construction of hamlet, village or town on the Frontier (section 31); removal of persons from their places of residence (section 36). The most oppressor law was section 40. Under this section the political agent could arrest anybody and that person had no right to redress the accusations against him. He could keep a person in jail for an unlimited period; the political agent ironically could arrest any relative in place of the accused.”
Also called Jirga system in local parlance, the FCR had nothing to do with the traditional tribal jirga. This is how Bangash puts it:
“The political agent selected members of the jirga whose recommendations were non-binding on him, making him the ultimate authority and final arbiter to initiate trial, prosecute offenders and award punishments. The jirga, although an informal institution, is an integral and effective part of the Pukhtun society in general and tribal people in particular. It is one of the most time honoured institutions in the tribal world and part of the culture of the tribesmen. However in the colonial era the political agents had the ultimate authority”.
After the creation of Pakistan the primitive FCR should have been relegated to the dustbin and replaced by the laws prevalent in the rest of the country. What is more the tribal areas should have been turned into a province or amalgamated in KP to bring them into the national mainstream.
This was not to be. The establishment wanted to treat the tribal belt as a strategic reserve and it was considered necessary to keep it under-developed. The tribes were called out to fight the war in Kashmir in 1948 because the regular army could not be used there. They were again called out during the 1965 war but were sent back without seeing action as the war ended within days. The last and the most callous use of the tribal areas was under Zia. The tribes were encouraged through local mullahs and Pakistan’s religious parties to join the American sponsored jihad in Afghanistan. The tribal areas were used to host foreign militants who used the area as a launching against Afghanistan. In the process both Afghanistan and Pakistan suffered.
One still awaits a decision by the establishment to strike down the FCR, hold Local Government elections, multiply development funds for education and social development and allow Pakistan’s civil society and political organisations to work freely in the tribal areas.
“The Frontier Tribal Belt, Genesis and Purpose Under the Raj”,
Salman Bangash,
OUP,
Pp 365,
Price Rs 995