LAHORE: “I am an Ahmadi, My name is Khan. There are four million of me in Pakistan. This Islamic Republic is the only state in the world which has officially declared me to be a non-Muslim. Why? It’s simple. I am an Ahmadi,” so writes Wajahat S. Khan, a Pakistani television journalist at his word press blog [http://wajskhan.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/i-am-an-ahmadi], hardly 24 hours after the appalling massacre of 95 Ahmadis on May 27, 2010 while they were offering Friday prayers in mosques located in two different localities of Lahore, the provincial capital of Pakistan’s Punjab province.

Thousands of worshippers, including women and children, were at Friday prayers when the fidayeen style terror raids at the two mosques began. It was surreal to see the images unfolding on our television screens when the terrorists went inside the two houses of prayer and unleashed their terror on the innocent worshippers. Numerous explosions were heard at the crime scenes in Model Town and Garhi Shahu and gunfire continued for hours, with images of at least two gunmen firing at police from the roof of one of the mosques. The gunmen opened during Friday prayers and threw grenades at mosques in residential neighbourhoods in Lahore. Of the two mosques targeted by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) terrorists, Baitul Noor is located in the upscale neighbourhood of Model Town while Darul Zikr is located in the heavily congested walled city area of Garhi Shahu.

At least one dozen heavily armed fidayeen attackers carrying hand grenades and automatic weapons, some of them wearing suicide jackets, stormed the mosques in two separate groups of seven and five respectively, hurling grenades and firing at worshippers. At the Garhi Shahu mosque, the attackers took hostage many of the Ahmadi worshipers and assumed control of the building. One of the attackers climbed atop the minaret of the mosque, started firing with an assault rifle and throwing hand grenades. The police force took almost three hours to kill the hostage takers and regain control of the mosque. As a result, 23 people were killed in Model Town and 72 in Garhi Shahu. The dead bodies were buried separately on Saturday after the Ahmadiya community cancelled a mass funeral because they were not satisfied with the security arrangements.

The Ahmadis had been shoved into quarters of isolation a long time ago by the Pakistani religio-political clergy. As Wajahat Khan puts it in his blog, “Ordinances have been passed against me. Acts and Constitutional Amendments have been drafted around me. Shortly after the heart and soul of our nation was ripped into two, a country reeling to define and defend its own identity unleashed itself upon me. In 1974, a parliament I had voted for adopted a law that outlawed me. You might have noted the affects of that today. As my attackers unleashed their wrath, television networks I watch and love got the location of the bloodshed all wrong. What I call a mosque, they called a “place of worship”. That’s alright though. It’s not their fault. I’m used to the special treatment. After all, I am an Ahmadi. But I wish things were different. I wish I was like you. I wish I was a Sunni, a Shia, a Punjabi, a Pakhtoon, a Baloch, a Sindhi, a Memon, a Gujrati, a Siraiki, or a Makrani. If I was any of those, or even anyone else, I would have been called a martyr or “shaheed” in the papers today.”

Interestingly, the heart wrenching blog did fetch a lot of comments from fellow bloggers but each one of them began by clarifying, “I am not an Ahmadi.” Naziha commented, “The Friday attack, the hatred, the growing extremism and palpable fear has become too much. Too much even for those who have always put Pakistan first, no matter what the threat; those who have always opted to contribute, no matter how severe the injustice, who have always considered themselves Pakistani, no matter how painful the identity.” Similarly, Sahar wrote, “I’m a Sunni. But today, we are all Ahmadis. We all grieve. And in our grief, we must all stand up as one and say no to this violence, and we must demand that the anti-Ahmadis laws be repealed immediately!”

The Ahmadis are a Muslim sect which was founded in Qadian, Punjab, in the 19th century. Its founder was Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a Muslim who claimed prophetic status as the Mahdi or Messiah, in succession to Krishna, Jesus Christ and Mohammed. Many Muslims of the mainstream Sunni sect are opposed to the Ahmadis as they believe that the group recognizes a successor to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), which contravenes conventional Islamic belief. However, the Ahmadi sect was formally declared non-Muslim in the Pakistani Constitution in 1974, by the then government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the face of a strong agitation launched by the country’s religio-political parties.

Since then, the Ahmadi sect has experienced state-sanctioned discrimination and occasional attacks by extremist Sunnis. Its four million-odd members have seen their religious rights in overwhelmingly Muslim Pakistan curtailed by law with every passing day. Ahmadis have been barred from holding their religious meetings even in Rabwah (also called Chanab Nagar), a town in Punjab that is the headquarters of the Ahmadi sect. Almost 95 percent of the population of this town is Ahmadi. However, the entire population of the town was forbidden to elect or even vote for their local government councilors. They were told that they could vote only as non-Muslims, which was unacceptable to them. Consequently, a local council was imposed on Rabwah, which did not represent 95% of its population.

With four million Ahmadis in Pakistan, persecution of Ahmadis has been quite systematic in this country whose founder had envisioned a liberal and secular state of Pakistan. But Pakistan is the only state to have officially declared the Ahmadis to be non-Muslims. The Ahmadis of Pakistan are prohibited by law from self-identifying as Muslims, and their freedom of religion has been curtailed by a series of ordinances, acts and constitutional amendments. As a result, persecution and hate-related incidents are constantly reported from different parts of the country, and Ahmadis have been the target of many attacks led by various religious groups, mainly belonging to the sunni deobandi sectarian groups like Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).

It is not for the first time that the sunni deobandi Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has targeted some minority sect in the country. But in the past, Shias used to be the prime target of the Hakeemullah Mehsud-led terror outfit. As far as the Friday’s bloody episode is concerned, many in the security agencies believe that the TTP actually decided to target the Ahmadis with the hope that it may win the sympathies of those in the Pakistani society who consider it a right to kill them (wajib-ul-qatal). The fact, however, is that the ant-Shia TTP unleashed terror on the worshipers of a minority that is not even allowed to call their place of worship a mosque and is forbidden under the Constitution and the law not to pronounce themselves Muslim or call their kalma as kalma.

In the aftermath of the May 27, 2010 terror attacks, many here believe that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan has become an intolerant nation where religious and sectarian minorities live in fear, they remain vulnerable and are awarded little or no protection by the state. This mindset is no more confined to the Pakistani Taliban who are in the habit of killing in the name of religion. Today, there is no shortage of sectarian and other militant outfits in Pakistan that feel justified in murdering Ahmadis, Shias, and Christians – or indeed anyone who doesn’t share their views.

In the words of Imtiaz Alam, the secretary general of the South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA), we don’t have the right to protest against the transgression of a misguided cartoonist against our faith if we do not allow the same right to our minorities to protest the agony of not being allowed to practice what they believe. “Since the first anti-Ahmadiya movement, passage of the 4th Amendment and promulgation of the Qadiyani Ordinance by General Ziaul Haq, a witch-hunt of the Ahmadis continues unabated. If certain westerners are not sensitive to our feelings, and we rightly protest, we too are insensitive towards our minorities or those we do not agree with us and we do not even allow them the right to challenge the injustice done to them”.

Asma Jahangir, the chairperson of the human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) believed that the politics of fanning religious frenzy on the basis of sectarianism, blasphemy and fighting infidels is intrinsically linked to creating an environment for breeding nurseries of terrorism and promoting vigilantism. “It creates a culture of intolerance that is inimical to all democratic values. It is not a matter of an ideological battle between the liberals and the rightists; it is a matter of keeping democratic values above all considerations. If the scourge of terrorism is to be eliminated, it can only be done by defeating their fascist ideology and subscribing to undiluted democratic and civilised values”, she added.

Pakistan’s terror-stricken Ahmadi community says the gory attack on its two worship places has made them more vulnerable. “The religious hardliners want us to leave Pakistan,” Qamar Suleman, a Jammat-e-Ahamdiya Pakistan office-bearer said. “All Pakistani extremist religious organisations are against Ahmadis and their negative propaganda had paved the way for such attacks. “Some groups even endorse the idea to kill Ahmadis terming them infidels as a license to go to heaven. Since no government has ever come hard on the elements instigating violence, it cannot be absolved of Friday’s tragedy. After this attack, we are very scared. Some of us are thinking to leave the country for the safety of our lives. Unless the government eliminates such elements such incidents can never be stopped,” he added.

English daily The News said in an editorial after the attack that Pakistan’s Ahmadi community has been under attack since the 1950s. “With the decades that have passed since then, the severity of their persecution has increased, and has been enshrined in law. In the mid-1970s they were declared non-Muslim. A decade later a bar was placed on them preaching or professing their faith. Violence of all kinds against them — murder, kidnappings, and forced conversions — has taken place. The latest attack is a continuation of this. It fits too with the more organised terrorism we have been seeing recently”, it added.

English daily Dawn said in one such editorial that the gruesome attacks on the Ahmadi worshippers were a tragic reminder of the growing intolerance that is threatening to destroy our social fabric. “Bigotry in this country has been decades in the making and is expressed in a variety of ways. Violence by individuals or groups against those who hold divergent views may be the most despicable manifestation of such prejudice but it is by no means the only one. Religious minorities in Pakistan have not only been shunted to the margins of society but also face outright persecution on a regular basis”, it added.

But a Daily Times editorial was quite critical of the Punjab government being run by the Pakistan Msulim League (PML-N) President Nawaz Sharif’s younger brother Shehbaz Sharif. “We have seen the Punjab government’s top minister hobnobbing with the leaders of banned terrorist groups, case in point being Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah mollycoddling a Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan leader in the Jhang district for electoral purposes. Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif recently begging mercy from the Taliban to spare Punjab is another grim reminder that our leaders are playing a very dangerous game. It seems the PML-N is playing the role of a fifth column in this war against terrorism. Instead of owning up to the fact that there are terrorists in Punjab, the provincial government has shifted the blame to an obscure ‘foreign hand’. The provincial government should not try to fool the public with red herrings. The people of this country want answers and not flimsy excuses. The Friday attacks were not just an assault on the Ahmadis but an assault on every citizen of Pakistan”, the editorial concluded.

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