Abdul Wali Khan

Khan Abdul Wali Khan (11 January 1917 – 26 January 2006) was a Pakistani politician who served as president of the National Awami Party from 1967 till its dissolution in 1986, and then of the Awami National Party, a left wing Pashtun nationalist federalist party. He was the Leader of the Opposition twice, from 1972 to 1975 and from 1988 to 1990. A political rival of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he led the Pakistan National Alliance, and then a nationwide uprising, against the Pakistan Peoples Party in the 1977 parliamentary election.

His early years were marked by his involvement in his father Abdul Ghaffar Khan's non-violent anti-colonial resistance movement, the Khudai Khidmatgar, against the British Raj. He narrowly escaped an assassination in his early years and was later sent to school at Colonel Brown Cambridge School in Dehradun. In his late teens, he became active in the Indian National Congress, with which the Khudai Khidmatgar was aligned. After the independence of Pakistan in 1947, Wali Khan initially became a controversial figure in Pakistani politics because of his association with the Congress which opposed the establishment of Pakistan.

A respected politician in his later years, he contributed to Pakistan's 1973 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.