The Citizenship Amendment Bill was tabled in the Parliament today amidst much ruckus and chaos by the Opposition and one community smack in the middle of the debate was the Ahmadiyya community. Ahmadiyya Community is a sect of Islam that is often persecuted in Islamic countries because Islamic nations believe that the community is not “Muslim enough”.
While the persecution of the community is tragic, it is indeed an internal problem of the Islamic community. With respect to the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan, a fact that is lesser known is that the community was at the forefront of the creation of Pakistan.
One of the foremost advocates for Pakistan was Muhammad Zafrulla Khan who was an Ahmadiyya. The Lahore Resolution of 1940 was authored by Khan himself. Commenting on his role, one commentator wrote, “[T]here needs to be a realisation that Jinnah was the ‘lawyer’ for the case of Pakistan. He argued for it and won. However, Jinnah was never the visionary or a revolutionary strategic thinker to guide the course of the nation. If anybody at all in Muslim League was a strategic thinker, it was Sir Zafarullah Khan, who was also the author of the Lahore Resolution, which for the first time chalked out the idea of Pakistan. Khan, however, belonged to the then Islamic sect of Ahmadis and thus his role over the years was kept a secret, until recently when documents and letters written by Lord Linlithgow revealed the centrality of his role. Hence, there should be a little less stress on ‘Jinnah’s Pakistan’, because honestly, there is none; and scratching out Jinnah’s vision forcefully has only served to confuse the people and obfuscate the roadway to progress”.
Prasanta Patnaik