Khudai Khidmatgars were popularly known as the ________

Concept

Colonial-era mass movements in India often built their public identity around a specific colour of uniform — a dyed, standardised dress that let volunteers be recognised at a glance and that became the movement's popular epithet, often overtaking its formal name in common usage.

Application

The Khudai Khidmatgars ("Servants of God"), founded by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in 1929 in the North-West Frontier Province, organised disciplined, non-violent volunteer cadres as part of the Indian freedom movement. Their cadre dyed its uniform a deep brick-red using a locally available dye — the specific detail behind the movement's widely used popular name, Red Shirts (Surkh Posh), a name that became far more common than the organisation's formal title.

Contrast

• Green Shirts — green is the recognised symbolic colour of the Muslim League and the later Pakistan movement, a distinct nationalist current active in the same broad period as the Khudai Khidmatgars' Frontier campaign.

• Red Shirts — the Khudai Khidmatgars' own Frontier cadre dyed its uniform a deep brick-red, the specific detail behind this popular name; this is the correct option.

• Black Shirts — black-uniformed paramilitary corps are historically associated with Benito Mussolini's Fascist movement in inter-war Italy, active through the same broad decades as the Khudai Khidmatgars' campaign but in a different country and political context.

• White Shirts — plain white khadi was the general dress adopted by Congress volunteers and satyagrahis across British India, contemporaries of the Khudai Khidmatgars, as a symbol of swadeshi simplicity rather than the Frontier cadre's specific dyed uniform.

Result

Hence, the Khudai Khidmatgars were popularly known as the Red Shirts.