He is the grandson of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, better known as Bacha Khan; Abdul Ghaffar was the founder of the non-violent Pashtun political movement, Khudai Khidmatgar ("Servants of God") in undivided India and a follower of Mahatma Gandhi.
In Peshawar, satyagraha was led by a Muslim Pashto disciple of Gandhi, Ghaffar Khan, who had trained 50,000 nonviolent activists called Khudai Khidmatgar.