All this lay ahead in 1946 when Caroe took up the reins as governor in Peshawar. His predecessor, Sir George Cunningham, at that point found little enthusiasm for joining Pakistan. In his diary, the outgoing governor quoted a Muslim visitor as saying that for the average Pathan villager, a suggestion of Hindu domination was only laughable. The Muslim Leagues weakness was confirmed in March provincial elections. Though Muslim League candidates inveighed against the Hindu Raj, Dr. Khan Sahibs Congress Party nonetheless carried thirty of fifty legislative seats. As independence loomed, the North-West Frontier was Indias only Muslim-majority province not governed by a Muslim League ministry. This put its last British governor in a delicate position. When Nehru proposed a tour of the frontier to rally his Congress allies, Caroe warned vainly against the trip on security grounds. On his arrival in September 1946, Nehru was greeted at the airport by thousands of jeering Islamic militants waving black flags and, as Caroe had predicted, the trip proved a humiliation. The stage was set for months of communal thuggery as Muslim gangs attacked Sikhs and Hindus in the provinces Settled Areas (as they were formally known).
To the Khan brothers, the import was plainthat Sir Olaf was promoting the tumult to discredit them. On May 6, 1947, Ghaffar Khan accused Caroe of joining an open conspiracy with the Muslim League to bathe the province in blood by condoning the murder of innocent men, women and children.
The charge was delivered in anger. Doubtless Dr. Khan Sahibs rattled provincial government made its own overzealous mistakes, and I find it hard to believe that Caroe connived in murder. Yet he did have a record of surreptitiously promoting his strongly held views and leaving few fingerprints. Some thumb marks, however, survived. Tucked deep in State Department files in the National Archives in Washington is this report by a visiting U.S. official of his interview with Caroe in May 1947: Sir Olaf indicated that the Foreign Office tended too much to look upon India as a peninsular unit like Italy.... He felt it did not sufficiently realize the great political importance of the Northwest Frontier Province and Afghanistan, which he described as the uncertain vestibule in future relations between Soviet Russia and India. Caroe expressed regret that his own government played down Soviet penetration of frontier areas like Gilgit, Chitral, and Swat, adding he would not be unfavorable to the establishment of a separate Pakhistan [sic].
Nehru and the Khan brothers thus had valid grounds for doubting Caroes impartiality when the viceroy took the unusual step of approving a plebiscite on the future of the frontier provinceelsewhere the choice between India and Pakistan was made by provincial ministries or princely rulers. As a gesture to Congress, Mountbatten also determined that Caroe was suffering badly from nerves and asked him to request a leave as provincial governor until the transfer of power. Caroe complied. A deputy presided as the referendum took place on July 17, its one-sided judgment in favor of joining Pakistan marred by charges of fraud and intimidation and by a boycott that kept half the 5 million eligible Pashtun voters from the polls. On August 17, as Pakistan came into existence, Dr. Khan Sahib refused to resign as chief minister. He and his cabinet were peremptorily dismissed, and a Muslim League ministry installed. Dr. Khan Sahib was subsequently jailed and later made his peace with Islamabad, serving briefly as a Pakistani minister before he was slain by an unforgiving Pashtun in 1957 in Lahore.
Of the leaders, the greatest loser was Ghaffar Khan. In newborn India he was all but abandoned by his former Congress Party allies, while in newborn Pakistan he was charged with sedition and promoting separatism. It made no difference that he took an oath of allegiance to the new state, or that he repeatedly insisted he sought autonomy for Pashtuns within Pakistan. He was repeatedly jailed or kept under house arrest until his death in Peshawar in 1988 at the age of ninety-eight. At his request, he was buried in the Afghan city of Jalalabad. His memory was honored by a cease-fire in the ongoing Afghan war as 20,000 mourners formed a cortege extending through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. Otherwise, the khan of khans was simply scrubbed from history ...
