Dawn: “Saaday vuss di gal nayi”
“It is not something that we can control”, was what the SHO of the local police station said to the Ahmadi men, watching the burning down of their fellow community members’ homes in Gujranwnala the night of July 27.
Arshad Mahmood, one of the eye witnesses of the arson from the Ahmadi community of Gujranwala had reached the neighborhood where a mob of some 250 men had gathered to intimidate Ahmadi residents.
Mahmood told me the mob was pelting stones at Ahmadi homes and beating down doors with batons. When the violent mob – which included some neighbors from the street of Peoples’ Colony where the incident took place – dragged a motor cycle out of one of the houses and set it on fire, the police voiced their helplessness.
Mahmood says the SHO ran from the spot once he saw people getting aggressive; he tried to pacify the mob by offering them an FIR against the Ahmadi boy who had allegedly committed blasphemy. Some from the members of the mob went to the station with him but eventually the size of the mob got bigger in Peoples’ Colony.
And they got horrifically bloodthirsty.
Mahmood and other community members say the police managed to recover the dead bodies of two minor girls Kainat, Hira and their grandmother Bushra from one of the houses after 12am. The rest of the trapped residents, mostly women were rescued by the kinder Barelvi and Wahabi neighbors.Those who had gone to get an FIR registered rejoined later; the fire spread from one house to another; roads were blocked and two police vans with constables from the local police station silently looked on, hoping that the local peace committee cleric’s pleas on the microphone would distract the mob – which it never did, as was realised at the cost of four deaths.
How things fall apart
There is now a ‘system’ in place for the ongoing discrimination and decimation of the Ahmadi community.
When clerics and anti-Ahmadi individuals who are trying to intimidate local Ahmadis fail, they go to the police and file a complaint. Then, a group of policemen go to the administration of the Ahmadi community, and ask them to do whatever it is the clerics want them to.
The community says, the act demanded by the clerics is against their faith, so the authorities get pro-active and for the sake of maintaining peace in the area, actually commit the hurtful acts which the bigoted clergy were threatening to do themselves.
Three years on, no justice for 86 dead Ahmadis
This is pretty much the standard procedure used by the Punjab police to counter any threats to peace given out by mob-minded clerics whenever an allegation is imagined against the Ahmadi community.
Over the last few years, the has been an increase in the number of incidents where the police goes to the Ahmadi community, asking them to “co-operate”, and further, acts on covering the Kalima with a black sheet from the place of worship’s facades, demolishing minarets of the community’s place of worship, removing scriptures from their shops or just the word “Muslim” from their gravestones or scratching away the name of a Pakistani citizen from his shop name-plate because it resembles a Muslim name, like Muhammad Ali.
Categories: Ahmadis And Pakistan, Ahmadiyyat: True Islam, Anti Islam act by Muslims, Asia