The News: The Ahmadiyya community sit back and watch while others vote
By Bilal Farooqi
For more than three decades, they have not dropped a vote down the slit of a ballot box — at least not until renouncing their faith. Ironically, even the man who had so diligently fought the case for their rights 20 years ago was unable to set the wrongs right for the General Elections 2013. But given the past disappointments, expecting anything else would have been overoptimistic.
It was the present Chief Election Commissioner, Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim, who was the counsel for the five appellants belonging to the Ahmadiyya community in the 1993 Zaheeruddin case. The five Ahmadis — Zaheeruddin, Abdur Rehman, Majid, Rafi Ahmad and Muhammad Hayat — had appealed before the apex court against the sentences handed down to them for wearing badges bearing the kalima and claiming to be Muslims.
They were convicted under the controversial Ordinance XX promulgated by the military ruler General Ziaul Haq in 1984, targeting the Ahmadiyya community.
Ebrahim had presented a strong argument before the court. He had submitted that Ordinance XX was “oppressively unjust, abominably vague, perverse, discriminatory, produce of biased mind, so mala fide and wholly unconstitutional being violative of Articles 19, 20 and 25 of the Constitution”. According to him, imposing restrictions on the Ahmadis’ “religious practices, utterances and beliefs” violated the right to speech, profess and practice one’s faith and amounted to serious discrimination.
Categories: Ahmadis And Pakistan, Ahmadiyyat: True Islam, Anti Islam act by Muslims, Asia