Source: The News on Sunday
By I A Rehman
Forty years ago Zulfikar Ali Bhutto claimed credit for solving the 90-year-old problem relating to the status of the Ahmadiya community. History has not ruled in his favour, for the constitutional amendment adopted by parliament on September 7, 1974, declaring the Ahmadis to be outside the fold of Islam, only aggravated the problem.
Time has also proved wrong the late Maulana Shah Ahmad Noorani who had declared, on the eve of the parliament’s session that adopted the Second Amendment to the Constitution of 1973, that the Ahmadis were being declared non-Muslim to save their lives. From the day the amendment was passed the Ahmadis have been becoming more and more vulnerable. Regardless of the identity of the men who have killed hundreds of Ahmadis since 1974, the state’s culpability cannot be denied.
The agitation against the Ahmadis started soon after Mirza Ghulam Ahmad had formulated his creed and the killing of Ahmadis was reported not only in India but also in Afghanistan in the 1920s. However, the campaign against the Ahmadis was confined largely to Punjab — the Ahmadis’ main recruiting ground — and where Ahmadi landlords/farmers attracted the hostility of their fellow agriculturists and similar was the outcome of the scramble for the few jobs available in government services. Every economic gain by the Ahmadis was attributed to British patronage and the campaign against them was given an anti-colonial flavour.
However, anti-Ahmadi feelings were limited to small religious groups, the Ahrars being the most prominent and consistent Ahmadi-baiters. When an Ahmadi was executed in Kabul the incident was denounced from the Muslim League platform. It was possible for Allama Iqbal to accept the head of the Ahmadiya community as an associate in the committee formed to help the Kashmiri Muslims against the Dogra atrocities. And Sheikh Abdullah saw no harm in finding solace in an Ahmadi-dominated mosque in Srinagar when the keepers of the main mosque did not like to welcome him.
Subsequently, the Allama ended his relations with the Ahmadis and denounced them in strong terms but nothing prevented him from appointing his Ahmadi nephew as a guardian to his small son. In 1931, the All-India Muslim League invited Ch. Zafarullah Khan to preside over its annual session and though a few agitators staged a demonstration against him outside the pandal the participants of the meeting were not bothered. Right up to the partition, the Muslim League overlooked divisions within the Muslim population and Ahmadis contributed to its human and material resources. The main thing is that the Ahmadis were not prevented from joining mainstream parties, nor were they barred from social intercourse with the major Muslim groups or family-to-family contacts.
There is also need to explore the link between the killing of Ahmadis by declaring them guilty of apostasy and the killing of Shias through similar reasoning, a transference of hate from one target to another. In a way, the Ahmadis formed the first line of victims of religious intolerance but they are not the last ones.
The Ahrars, who had had a love-hate relationship with the Muslim League, did not reconcile themselves to their complete ouster from the political stage during 1945-47. In the early years of independence, they tried to mend their fences with some League leaders, if not with the party. In the 1951 election in Punjab, they offered to support the Muslim League candidates, except for the Ahmadis among them. They continued to be friendly with the Muslim League leaders after the polls as, it is said, no Ahmadi had been elected on the League ticket.
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