ISLAMABAD: Despite the systematic persecution of Ahmadis, Pakistan has rarely faced the sustained international pressure that such state-sponsored discrimination would ordinarily invite. The discrimination, embedded in the country's constitution, penal code, electoral system, police enforcement, and judicial processes, is often treated as a domestic sensitivity rather than a system of religious repression, a report has stated.
According to a report in online magazine ‘The Diplomat’, the silence has effectively enabled Pakistan's establishment to uphold discriminatory laws at home, while projecting itself abroad as a constitutional democracy.
“Pakistan should not be allowed to hide behind the language of public order while its own laws manufacture disorder for the religious communities inside the country. The Ahmadi community issue is not whether Ahmadis are unpopular among clerics or mobs or that Islamists don’t like them. The issue is that Pakistan as a state has made their religious identity punishable, their worship suspect, and their vote and citizenship conditional,” the report detailed.
“The world should not treat their persecution as a domestic sensitivity or as a series of isolated sectarian incidents. It is a warning about a community being pushed out of equal citizenship by law, mobs, police, courts, and political silence,” it added.
The report noted that Pakistan's laws make it a criminal offence for Ahmadis to "pose" as Muslims, identify their faith as Islam, preach or propagate it, or invite others to accept it. Those found guilty, it said, can face up to three years in prison and a fine under the legal provisions
“This intentional listing of Ahmadi Muslims in the legal order among non-Muslim faiths, in a deeply Muslim and conservative country, has made discrimination against Ahmadis not only a matter of social hostility or extremist violence, but something placed at the heart of the Pakistan state itself,” it noted
Farooq Aftab, an Ahmadi academic from the Secretariat of the London-based International Human Rights Committee, told The Diplomat, “The legal discrimination is not subtle – it is textual and state-sponsored.”
Citing the expert, the report said that Pakistan's legal structure provides a ready-made language of accusation for targeting Ahmadis.
“A mob attacking an Ahmadi mosque can present itself not as lawless, but as enforcing religious boundaries the state itself has drawn. A cleric demanding the sealing of an Ahmadi mosque can frame discrimination as law enforcement. A police officer can restrict worship and claim he is preventing unrest. This is how law becomes permission for persecution of a minority,” it mentioned.
Highlighting that the persecution continues beyond life, the report said Ahmadi graves have repeatedly been vandalised because they bear Islamic inscriptions. It added that communities have, in some cases, reportedly come under pressure to remove religious symbols from graves and places of worship.
--IANS
