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Pashtunistan

Pashtunistan
پښتونستان
Historical region
Map of Pakistan's major ethnic groups in 1980
Map of ethnic groups in Pakistan, with Pashtun-inhabited areas shown in green and shared with neighbouring Afghanistan
Countries Pakistan
 Afghanistan
Population
 (2012)
 • Totalc. 55–60 million[1][2][3]
Demographics
 • Ethnic groupsMajority: Pashtuns
Minorities: Baloch, Gujjar, Pashayis, Tajik, Nuristanis, Hazaras, Indus Kohistani
 • LanguagesMajority: Pashto
Minorities: Dari, Gujari, Urdu, Hindko, Balochi, Brahui, Ormuri, Parachi, Pashayi languages, Nuristani languages
Time zoneUTC+04:30 (Afghanistan)
UTC+05:00 (Pakistan)
Largest cities

Pashtunistan (Pashto: پښتونستان, lit. 'land of the Pashtuns', Persian: پشتونستان)[4] is a region located on the Iranian Plateau, inhabited by the indigenous Pashtun people of southern Afghanistan[5] and northwestern Pakistan,[6][7] wherein Pashtun culture, the Pashto language, and Pashtun identity have been based.[8][9][10] Alternative names historically used for the region include Pashtūnkhwā (پښتونخوا), Pakhtūnistān,[11] Pathānistān,[12][13] or simply the Pashtun Belt.[14][15]

During British rule in India in 1893, Mortimer Durand drew the Durand Line, fixing the limits of the spheres of influence between the Emirate of Afghanistan and British India during the Great Game and leaving about half of historical Pashtun territory under British colonial rule; after the partition of India, the Durand Line now forms the internationally recognized border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.[16] The traditional Pashtun homeland stretches roughly from the areas south of the Amu River in Afghanistan to the areas west of the Indus River in Pakistan; it predominantly comprises the southwestern, eastern and some northern and western districts of Afghanistan, and Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan in Pakistan.[17]

Part of a series on
Pashtuns
Empires and dynasties

The 16th-century revolutionary leader Bayazid Pir Roshan of Waziristan and the 17th-century "warrior-poet" Khushal Khan Khattak assembled Pashtun armies to fight against the Mughal Empire in the region. During this time, the eastern parts of Pashtunistan were ruled by the Mughals while the western parts were ruled by Safavid Iran. Pashtunistan first gained an autonomous status in 1709, when Mirwais Hotak successfully revolted against the Safavids in Loy Kandahar. The Pashtuns later achieved unity under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Durrani, who founded the Durrani dynasty and established the Afghan Empire in 1747. In the 19th century, however, the Afghan Empire lost large parts of its eastern territory to the Sikh Empire and later the British Empire. Famous Indian independence activists of Pashtun origin include Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai, and Mirzali Khan. Abdul Ghaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgar movement was strongly opposed to the partition of India along Hindu–Muslim religious lines.[18][19][20] When the Indian National Congress declared its acceptance of the partition plan without consulting Khudai Khidmatgar leaders, Khan expressed staunch disagreement.[21] Despite the Bannu Resolution, in which the Khudai Khidmatgar movement demanded that the Pashtun-majority North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) become an independent Pashtun state, the NWFP was incorporated into the Dominion of Pakistan following the 1947 NWFP referendum.[22][23] The NWFP referendum was boycotted by Khudai Khitmatgar and rejected by Khan and his brother, then-chief minister Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan, who remarked that it did not give voters the option to make the NWFP an independent state or merge it with Afghanistan rather than independent India or Pakistan.[24][25] Later on in his life, he regretfully stated that "Pashtunistan was never a reality" and that the idea of an independent Pashtunistan would never help Pashtuns and only cause suffering for them. He further stated that the "successive governments of Afghanistan only exploited the idea for their own political goals".[26] Furthermore, the growing participation of Pashtuns in the Pakistani state and government resulted in the erosion of any remaining support for the secessionist Pashtunistan movement by the end of the 1960s.[27] In 1969, the autonomous princely states of Swat, Dir, Chitral, and Amb were merged into the Pakistani NWFP. In 2018, the Pashtun-majority Federally Administered Tribal Areas, formerly an autonomous buffer zone with Afghanistan, were also merged into the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (previously known as the NWFP), fully integrating the region with Pakistan proper.[28]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference CIA-Pak-pop was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ "Afghanistan population: 30,419,928 (July 2012 est.) [Pashtun 42%] = 12,776,369". The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Archived from the original on July 26, 2009. Retrieved 20 September 2010.
  3. ^ Lewis, Paul M. (2009). "Pashto, Northern". SIL International. Dallas, Texas: Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Retrieved 18 September 2010. Ethnic population: 49,529,000 possibly total Pashto in all countries.
  4. ^ Various spellings result from different pronunciation in various Pashto dialects. See Pashto language: Dialects for further information.
  5. ^ Minahan, James (10 February 2014). Ethnic Groups of North, East, and Central Asia : An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, California. ISBN 978-1-61069-018-8. OCLC 879947835.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  6. ^ Roddy, Stephen J.; Sharma, Shalendra D., eds. (1 May 2002). "Asia Pacific: Perspectives" (PDF). University of San Francisco. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 August 2019. Retrieved 15 March 2023.
  7. ^ Minahan, James B. (30 August 2012). Ethnic Groups of South Asia and the Pacific: An Encyclopedia: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 9781598846607 – via Google Books.
  8. ^ Nath, Samir (2002). Dictionary of Vedanta. Sarup & Sons. p. 273. ISBN 81-7890-056-4. Retrieved 2010-09-10.
  9. ^ "The History of Herodotus Chapter 7". Translated by George Rawlinson. The History Files. Archived from the original on 2012-02-05. Retrieved 2007-01-10.
  10. ^ Houtsma, Martijn Theodoor (1987). E.J. Brill's first encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913-1936. Vol. 2. Leipzig: BRILL. p. 150. ISBN 90-04-08265-4. Retrieved 2010-09-24.
  11. ^ Students' Britannica India. Vol. 1–5. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2000. ISBN 9780852297605. Ghaffar Khan, who opposed the partition, chose to live in Pakistan, where he continued to fight for the rights of the Pashtun minority and for joining Afghanistan. Afghanistan means literally land of the pashtun people! the Homeland of the Pashtuns is Afghanistan
  12. ^ The Modern Review, Volume 86. Prabasi Press Private. 1949. The Afghan Government is actively sympathetic towards their demand for a Pathanistan. It has been declared by the Afghan Parliament that Afghanistan does not recognise the Durand line...
  13. ^ The Spectator. Vol. 184. F.C. Westley. 1950. Instead it adopted the programme of an independent "Pathanistan" — a programme calculated to strike at the very roots of the new Dominion. More recently the Pathanistan idea has been taken up by Afghanistan.
  14. ^ "Hindi music 'has roots in Hindu Kush's Pashtoon belt'". The Express Tribune. 17 January 2023. Retrieved 2023-02-19.
  15. ^ Dan Caldwell (17 February 2011). Vortex of Conflict: U.S. Policy Toward Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. Stanford University Press. p. 36. ISBN 978-0-8047-7666-0. A majority of Pashtuns live south of the Hindu Kush (the 500-mile mountain range that covers northwestern Pakistan to central and eastern Pakistan) and with some Persian speaking ethnic groups. Hazaras and Tajiks live in the Hindu Kush area, and north of the Hindu Kush are Persians and Turkic ethnic groups.
  16. ^ Synovitz, Ron. "Controversial Proposal Of 'Pashtunistan'". RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty.
  17. ^ Shane, Scott (5 December 2009). "The War in Pashtunistan". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 October 2017.
  18. ^ "Abdul Ghaffar Khan". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 24 September 2008.
  19. ^ "Abdul Ghaffar Khan". I Love India. Retrieved 24 September 2008.
  20. ^ Qasmi, Ali Usman; Robb, Megan Eaton (2017). Muslims against the Muslim League: Critiques of the Idea of Pakistan. Cambridge University Press. p. 2. ISBN 9781108621236.
  21. ^ "Partition and Military Succession Documents from the U.S. National Archives".
  22. ^ Electoral History of NWFP (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 10 August 2013.
  23. ^ Michael Brecher (2017-07-25). A Century of Crisis and Conflict in the International System: Theory and Evidence: Intellectual Odyssey III. Springer. ISBN 9783319571560. Retrieved 25 July 2017.
  24. ^ Meyer, Karl E. (2008-08-05). The Dust of Empire: The Race For Mastery In The Asian Heartland – Karl E. Meyer – Google Boeken. PublicAffairs. ISBN 9780786724819. Retrieved 10 July 2013.
  25. ^ "Was Jinnah democratic? — II". Daily Times. December 25, 2011. Retrieved February 24, 2019.
  26. ^ "Everything in Afghanistan is done in the name of religion: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan". India Today. Archived from the original on 8 January 2019. Retrieved 13 January 2014.
  27. ^ Cite error: The named reference Rizwan was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  28. ^ "The Fata merger: What's happening now and what should happen next?".
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