Khan Abdul Wali Khan

Khan Abdul Wali Khan (; ; 11 January 1917 – 26 January 2006) was a Pakistani democratic socialist politician who served as president of Awami National Party. Son of the prominent Pashtun nationalist leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Wali Khan was an activist and a writer against the British Raj like his father. His early years were marked by his involvement in his father's non-violent resistance movement, the "red shirts" against the British Raj. He narrowly escaped an assassination in his early years and was later sent to school at Colonel Brown Cambridge School, Dehra Dun. In his late teens, he became active in the Indian National Congress. After the formation of Pakistan in 1947, Wali Khan became a controversial figure in Pakistani politics during his political career because of his association to the Congress which opposed the creation of Pakistan. A respected politician in his later years, he contributed to Pakistan's third constitution and led protests for the restoration of democracy in the 1960s and 1980s. In the 1970s, he also served as the parliamentary leader of opposition in Pakistan's first directly elected parliament. Early life Wali Khan was born on 11 January 1917, to a family of local landlords in the town of Utmanzai in Charsadda district of the North-West Frontier province of what was then undivided India. His father, Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan), was a prominent Pashtun Nationalist and founder of the pacifist Khudai Khidmatgar ("Volunteer" in Pashto) movement. His mother, Mehar Qanda Khan, belonged to the nearby Razar village, and married Bacha Khan in 1912; she died during the flu pandemic after World War I.