Vindictive sentiments

Unbeknownst to many, during the British Raj, a Viceroy of India was assassinated by a disgruntled native. The fourth Viceroy of India, Richard Southwell Bourke (Earl of Mayo) or simply 'Lord Mayo' (founder of the famous 'Mayo College' in Ajmer), was stabbed to death by Sher Ali Afridi, at Port Blair, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in 1872. The Pashtun from Tirah valley in Khyber Agency, had served in the East India Company's Presidency Armies, Punjab Mounted Police and later as a cavalryman and mounted orderly for Maj General Reynell Taylor, who had awarded Sher Ali with a citation, pistol and horse for his soldering conduct.

About the fierce Pashtuns, no less than Alexander the Great had said, as early as the fourth century BC: 'May God keep you away from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the revenge of the Afghans'. However, within the comity of warlike Pashtuns, the 'martial' instincts of the Afridis from Tirah valley, is legendary. Controlling the gateway of Khyber Pass, Mughal Emperor Babar tried subduing their irascible behaviour, but the implacably hostile Afridis defied repeated attempts, even by subsequent armies of Mughal Emperors like Akbar, Jahangir, and Aurangzeb. Their notoriety continued during the British Raj, with the colonists first attempting to co-opt the Afridis with subsidies, contracts and even raising a dedicated regiment made up of Afridi tribesmen i.e., Khyber Rifles – but the easily provoked Afridis mutinied (which also led to the Battle of Saragarhi). Later, the consummate fighters were also misused by the newly independent Pakistan to foment trouble in Kashmir as raiders. Ironically, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is now at the forefront of attacking the Pakistan state, had leaders like Tariq Afridi from the same Tirah valley. To such a bilious lot, was Sher Ali Afridi, a Pashtun who would invoke the inviolable and timeless code of Pashtunwali i.e., Badal (revenge), be born.

Sher Ali Afridi, as is the won't of quarrelsome tribesmen of the region, was involved in a bloody private feud, pursuant to which he was supposed to have killed a relative in broad daylight. In his tribal mind, he was innocent and even though his initial sentence of death-by-hanging was reduced to life imprisonment, he remained unconvinced and instinctively sought revenge on 'some high British official'. Such nescience was natural to Sher Ali, as was noted by a man who would later play a significant role for the British Crown, Winston Churchill, who said about Pashtuns: 'Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud…Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left paid'. Sher Ali Afridi lived up to that fearsome description.

Sher Ali was soon deported to the penal colony or the infamous Kala Pani outpost at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, to serve out his life imprisonment. Whilst the former soldier remained inconspicuous and relatively well-behaved during his sentence term, his tribal-feudal-religious beliefs harboured the irrepressible urge of revenge, and the opportunity knocked with a chance visit of the Viceroy of India to the Islands. Sher Ali knew of the vicegeral visit and planned his chance, accordingly – he wanted to kill both the viceroy and the superintendent of the jail. A serendipitous opportunity came for Sher Ali who was hiding in the dark, and he immediately pounced upon Lord Mayo and stabbed him repeatedly. The Viceroy soon bled to death and the unrepentant and radical Sher Ali was immediately apprehended. He defiantly attributed the act to instructions of God, as in his mind, he had only avenged his sense of having been personally wronged and settled his score.

Reportage of his final moments posits a rather detached and self-assured person: 'The police officer who came down to investigate the affair, as he ascended the steps leading up to the scaffold, asked him a question. He shook his head with a smile, as he said Nahin Sahib. As soon as he got up, he asked the hangman to turn his face towards Mecca and then began to pray very loudly and quickly'. There were some unproven insinuations of a jihadi-plot (the word jihad was used even then), given that there were some other prisoners jailed for jihadist plots – but no linkages were proven and it turns out that Sher Ali Afridi acted on his own volition and sense of duty.

The murder was conveniently played down by all concerned and therefore history bears very little mention of this incident. Local authorities did not want to look in bad light owing to an obvious security failure, the 'Crown' itself did not want to embolden others to do such an act, violent sectarism was at risk, the other prisoners did not glorify the act fearing unnecessary retribution, the Indian freedom fighters saw no mention of a nationalistic impulse, and finally there was nothing to suggest anything other than personal revenge, albeit, on the Viceroy of India. It was held in a moment of time when the imagination of an independent sovereign was still in its infancy, the interlinkages with other anti-imperialist agents were minimal, and the impact of the 'news' could be controlled by the British Raj, to a very large extent.

There were some attempts to creatively frame Sher Ali's act and contextualise the same as the 'first' prominent jihad-inspired terror or conversely, as a 'freedom fighter' who symbolically killed the highest-authority of an oppressive coloniser – however more likely than not, his inspirational construct was not as sophisticated and nuanced as sought to be reconstructed, but more basic and personal to the individual. Spin-doctors with partisan agenda could attribute linear motive and relevance either way, as history is a favourite tool to build a vested narrative. But, perhaps in the overall disinterest of the story, lies the open-and-shut elements of an individual seeking a limited objective of his personal redemption. Today, Sher Ali's ilk continue their revisionist and tribalistic instincts in the wounded Afghanistan-Pak realm, and history reminds the price of wronging a Pashtun, individually.

The writer is the former Lt Governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands & Puducherry. Views expressed are personal