If Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's stopover in Lahore to meet his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif on 25 December, 2015 came as a surprise, the subsequent militant attack on the Pathankot airbase in India's Punjab barely a week later on 2 January, did not.
Given past patterns, many had been expecting an unfortunate incident to mar the bonhomie between Pakistan and India that Modi's Christmas Day visit had generated. Some expressed their apprehensions privately, some on social media. Indian intelligence officers revealed that they had been tracking information about an anticipated attack on the airbase in Pathankot for a few days before it took place. According to reports based on telephone intercepts and other evidence, the attack was launched from Pakistani soil.
This was soon followed by another tragedy in Pakistan on 20 January, 2016 when gunmen attacked Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, near Peshawar, killing 21 students and staff. The university is named after the Pashtun nationalist leader and freedom fighter Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, known as 'Badshah' (king) or Bacha Khan. A devout Muslim who stood for a tolerant version of Islam that the Taliban oppose, he led a non-violent red-shirted army of Khudai Khidmatgars (servants of God) against the British Empire. He was also known as the Frontier Gandhi due to his insistence on non-violence and close friendship with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The university was commemorating his 28th death anniversary on 20 January with a mushaira.
Bacha Khan had initially opposed the creation of Pakistan but pledged allegiance to the new nation after 14 August, 1947. He spent the rest of his life in and out of jail for opposing several policies of the Pakistan government. When he died in Peshawar in 1988 while under house arrest, India declared a five-day mourning period. Bacha Khan was buried in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in accordance with his wishes. Despite the security establishment having portrayed him as a 'traitor' for years, hundreds of thousands of mourners attended his funeral.