by NADEEM F. PARACHA
The Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan constitutes just one percent of the country’s population. Yet, almost every other day, social media sites are flooded with photos, videos and information highlighting the discrimination that this community has continued to suffer ever since its status was constitutionally reduced to that of a non-Muslim ‘minority’ in what became the ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan.’
This happened in 1974, just a year after a new constitution was adopted by the parliament.
Even though the country’s first constitution passed by a constituent assembly in 1956 had also declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic, the name was changed to just ‘Pakistan’ when, in 1958, Gen Ayub Khan overthrew the government in a military coup. A new constitution passed in 1962 expanded the name to ‘Republic of Pakistan.’ However, it was soon changed back to ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan.’ But interestingly, it kept appearing as Republic of Pakistan in state and government documents. This changed when the official name was reinforced in the 1973 constitution.
It is important to know this. In 1974, when anti-Ahmadiyya riots broke out, Islamist parties demanded that the ‘Ahmadiyya question’ and/or their status as a Muslim sect be discussed in the National Assembly. In his book, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Pakistan, the constitutional expert Rafi Raza writes that PM Bhutto refused to let the assembly discuss the issue because the parliament was not a place to debate theological matters.
But the Islamist parties retorted that since the country was now an Islamic Republic, its elected members had every right to discuss matters of religion. In 2013, while researching the 1974 ouster of the Ahmadiyya community from the fold of Islam through the 2nd Constitutional Amendment, I noticed that, till the late 1980s, not much was written about the issue. Even to this day, when comparatively more debates take place on the matter, it seems that most speakers still have a somewhat limited knowledge of the issue.
As Umer Farooq, in his essay for the Pak Institute of Peace Studies, and Ali Usman Qasmi, in his 2014 book Politics of Religious Exclusion, demonstrate, the 2nd Amendment did not criminalise the Ahmadiyya from continuing to practise their beliefs or call themselves Muslim. This was actually criminalised a decade later, in April 1984, through an ordinance (Ordinance XX) issued by the Gen Zia dictatorship. It forbade the Ahmadiyya from calling themselves Muslim. They were also disallowed to call their places of worship as mosques or practise Islamic rituals.
My research shows that incidents of violence, against the Ahmadiyya, that had suddenly peaked just before the 1974 amendment, drastically dropped after the Ahmadiyya were declared as a religious minority. But the research also shows a gradual increase in violence against the community only after Ordinance XX was introduced. By then, the state too had become a party to the violence.
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