- Without Ahmadi member
Apparently, the PTI government is taking a forthright constitutional stand with its Religious Affairs Minister Noorul Haq Qadri saying that it will not include an Ahmadi on the Minorities Commission of Pakistan, unless that member respects the Constitution, and thus it is not being formed because of this. The Ahmadi community (both sects) insist that they are Muslims, and do not accept the constitutional amendment which declared them non-Muslims in 1975. The PTI government is thus unable to solve the question of how to form a Minorities Commission without Ahmadi representation. The question has become urgent because the Supreme Court had ordered the Commission’s formation. This has not been done, even though legislation mandating it had been passed in 2015. The Act only specifies that 10 of the 12 members shall be from the minorities, but as the Ahmadis are the third-largest minority in Pakistan, forming a Commission without an Ahmadi member would be meaningless. However, any Ahmadi who accepted that Ahmadis are a minority would have violated the tenets of his faith, and thus his representative character would be in doubt.
It may appear a matter of clergies at war. While Muslim clerics insist on the sanctity of the Constitution when it comes to Ahmadis, a section does not accept that it is valid otherwise, Ahmadi clerics insist on a Muslim-ness that violates the Constitution. However, Ahmadis have served after 1975 as MNAs, thereby taking oaths on the Constitution. At present, though, none are.
While the government should not endanger anyone’s faith, it must consider that its treatment of minorities is under scrutiny from the comity of nations. There was ill-concealed glee in Islamabad on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom’s condemnation of Indian atrocities against Muslims, but there is no need for any action that would land Pakistan into similar international disapprobation. It is true that India acts according to a biased policy based on an extremist Hindu philosophy, and Pakistan on a kind of blundering stupidity, but the result will be the same: international and general condemnation of the treatment of minorities. The difficulty of getting a representative Ahmadi on the commission should not be underestimated, but the present option of not having a Commission has been negated by the Supreme Court.
