Editorial

Ahmadiyya mosque stormed, books seized
Government’s ban order was wrong

The government’s looking the other way about the extremist elements within the ruling coalition in January, when it banned all Ahmadiyya publications, has begun to bear its poisonous fruit. Last Friday, over 2000 anti-Ahmadiyya activists marched on the Ahmadiyya mosque in Nakhalpara, and, threatening violence, intimidated the police into allowing the mob’s leaders to enter the mosque and search for and seize publications that they deemed to fall under the government’s January order.

Now we have concrete evidence of how the ban on Ahmadiyya publications is being used by religious extremists to whip up hatred of this tiny and defenseless community.

Once again, the government has permitted anti-Ahmadiyya activists to use the threat of violence to advance their agenda of hatred. It is outrageous that the police would permit a mob threatening violence to dictate terms to it. But this is what the government has allowed the anti-Ahmadiyya activists to do since they commenced their agitation late last year. They have been permitted to assault policemen and intimidate and incite violence and hatred with impunity. And now they have been permitted to seize Ahmadiyya publications even though it is not their right.

The principal blame for this disgraceful occurrence lies with the government’s decision to ban Ahmadiyya publications in January. At the time the ban was announced, all right thinking people criticised it for being an unconstitutional infringement on religious freedom and a shameful surrender to the forces of communalism, and warned that it would only further marginalise the already persecuted Ahmadiyya community and embolden religious bigots to step up their programme of persecution. In fact, all of this was obvious, even though the government chose not to see it.

Now we have concrete evidence of how the ban on Ahmadiyya publications is being used by religious extremists to whip up hatred of this tiny and defenseless community. It is bad enough that the government surrendered to communalism by promulgating an order that is clearly unconstitutional in the first place. After such a glaring abuse of the ban order it needs to be withdrawn and those who took the law into their own hands should be taken to task.