Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai

Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai (7 July 1907 – 2 December 1973) , commonly known as Khan Shaheed (This title or name was given by the great Baba-e-Afghan Abdul Rahim Khan Mandokhail) was a Pashtun nationalist and political leader from the then British Indian province of Baluchistan. He founded the Anjuman-i-Watan Baluchistan, which was allied with the Indian National Congress.

Early life

Achakzai wrote that he was born on 7 July, in the village of Innayatullah Karez. He lost his father early in life. He and his brother, Abdul Salam Khan, were raised by the matriarch Dilbara. Achakzai received his early education at home and was well-versed in the classical Pashto, Arabic, and Persian texts. He joined the local middle school and proved an outstanding student, earning a scholarship.

Career

Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai was imprisoned in May 1930 for the first time. He was previously warned by the rulers for his lectures to the villagers at the mosque.

In his political struggle he founded Anjuman-i-Watan on 30 May 1938 (Khan Shaheed though remained in alliance against British colonial rule in India, but never merged his led Anjuman-i-Watan in the Indian National Congress), which opposed the partition of India.

In 1954, after the creation of Pakistan, he founded "Wror Pashtun" movement, later merged with the Pakistan's largest progressive alliance that became National Awami Party (NAP), as he was believer of the Pashtun unified geographical unit in Pakistan. He parted ways with the latter after merging the Pashtun lands into Balochistan province that violated the NAP manifesto to form national units of Pashtun, Baloch, Sindhi, Siraiki, Bengali and Punjabis.

Literary life

Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai reformed the Bayazid Roshan Pashto script by excluding the Arabic alphabets that his fellow Pashtuns could not pronounce, and was the advocate to have a script of Pashto the way it is pronounced.

Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai had command over the Arabic, Persian, English, Urdu, Balochi and Sindhi languages but loved his mother tongue Pashto the most and believed in its core importance in the nationalist struggle. He translated several books to Pashto, including, Tarjuman-ul-Quran of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Gulistan-i-Saadi of Sheikh Saadi and Future of Freedom of Dotson Carto, 'Seerat-ul-Nabi of Shabli Numani. Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai succeeded in publishing the first ever newspaper in the province history "Istiqlal" from Quetta in 1938 after his 7 years hard struggle to get the Indian Press Act extended to the region.

Assassination On the night of 2 December 1973, during the governor's rule imposed by Bhutto in Baluchistan, Achakzai was assassinated in a grenade attack on his home. The identity of his assassins has never been discovered.

Zama Zhwand aw Zhwandoon' (The way I lived) was transliterated into English by Samad Khan's son, Mohammad Khan Achakzai, who also served as governor of Balochistan from 2013 to 2018. It took Mohammad Khan Achakzai more than seven years to translate his father's opus written in haute Pashto into English. Later, the original Pashto edition was also translated into Ukrainian by high ranking diplomats, Mr Vasili Ivashko and Dr Ghulam Sarwar. Both of the versions, English and Ukrainian, will be out of press by the end of November.