{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03602533650039588, 'fraction_numerical': 0.00870942201108472, 'mean_word_length': 5.3813131313131315, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
India, Pakistan or Pakhtunistan? The Nationalist Movements in the North-West Frontier Province, 1937–1947 . By Erland Jansson. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 1981. 243 pp. Appendixes, Abbreviations, Glossary, Bibliography, Maps, Index. S.Kr. 106.50.

The politics of the Northwest Frontier Province of India fit only uneasily into the patterns of subcontinental politics under the British. In this book, Erland Jansson takes a detailed look at the Frontier's politics in the critical decade before India's partition in an effort to understand the elements that defined the Frontier's unique political history. Jansson's approach to Frontier politics has been deeply influenced, as he admits in his introduction, by the historical approach of the so-called "Cambridge School." The process of political change in twentieth-century India was one strongly influenced in this view by the changing pattern of British imperial administration. Gradual British "withdrawal" from the localities opened up increasingly important local arenas in the twentieth century to the competition of local elites. In the Frontier, alliances among local interests laid the foundations, in Jansson's account, for the emergence of powerful "nationalist movements." The emergence of the most powerful "nationalist movement" in the Frontier, the Khudai Khidmatgar movement of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, drew much of its strength from the local factional opposition between "small khans," whose economic fortunes were on the rise, and the "big khans," whose political interests had long been closely allied with those of the government. Jansson is at pains to stress the ideological identification of the Khudai Khidmatgars with "Pakhtun nationalism," but sees the strength of its organization largely as an expression of local opposition to the dominance of pro-British "big khans." The Frontier Muslim League, on the other hand, which never attained the organized local strength of the Khudai Khidmatgars, developed largely as an outgrowth of the efforts of the "big khans" to protect their interests against the challenge of the Khudai Khidmatgars and their Congress allies. During the period up until the end of World War II, "politics," Jansson declares, "revolved mostly around local issues" (p. 19). Conflicts between "big khans" and "small khans" reflected not class interests but rivalries over "local power," and provincial political affiliations were important largely in offering leverage to these competing factions in the localities.