Canadian activist and polemicist Tarek Fatah, responding to my article ‘Shorish Kashmiri, Azad and partition’ last week (Daily Times, June 30, 2014) thought it wise to declare, on Twitter, that what I had written about Shorish Kashmiri was inspired by Ahmedi propaganda. He declared that no Ahmedi had fought against the British and that the British had sustained the Ahmedi community and rewarded it time and again. This, of course, is the standard line of the mullahs in Pakistan, a line that has been forwarded time and again by Tehreek-e-Khatm-e-Nabuwat and Majlis-e-Ahrar. This was also the elaborate fiction that Shorish Kashmiri invented along with Ataullah Shah Bokhari and Mazhar Ali Azhar of Ahrar in the 1940s to attack the Muslim League and discredit it as the authoritative representative of Muslims. What is strange however is that a self-styled progressive refusenik like Fatah, who does not tire of attacking Muslims otherwise, has chosen to repeat this distortion of history.

The biggest issue the scholars of Deobandi and Barelvi schools had with the Ahmedis was that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the sect, had reinterpreted the doctrine of jihad as more than qital (fighting). Consequently, the Ahmedi community as a whole remained constitutional and law-abiding citizens of British India. The Ahmedi religious movement itself had been at the forefront of the missionary activities of the church. Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, before founding the Ahmedi sect, had been considered the intellectual champion of Muslims against the onslaught of the Christian west and the re-absorption activities of Hindu sects like the Arya Samajists. A peaceful, hardworking and enterprising community, the Ahmedis produced the likes of Sir Zafrullah Khan who was one of the finest advocates in law, the president of the Muslim League for a while, one of Pakistan’s founders and later head of the International Court of Justice. For this reason, Ahmedis are denounced as British agents even though there is not a single Ahmedi who received any patronage or pension from the British Empire.

Let us, however, look at the roles of those other groups who were considered to be at the forefront of the Independence Movement. That the Hindu reform and revival movement itself owed a great deal to British patronage after 1857 can hardly be disputed. Needless to say, the most celebrated freedom fighter in all of South Asia, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, made his name as a recruiter for the British Empire before and during the First World War. When Jinnah asked Gandhi to join the movement for Indian self-rule, Gandhi’s condescending reply, in olde English, was, “First ye seek the recruiting office” and then the British will open their doors to his petitions. For his stellar services to the British Empire, in 1915 Gandhiji was awarded the Kaiser-e-Hind medal — the highest honour for a loyal British Indian subject.

More: