Lahore (AsiaNews) –Pakistan’s Ahmadi community has decided to boycott the upcoming National and provincial elections, set for January 8th, in protest against the “religious discrimination” by the “electoral Commission”. An official press statement released by the community announced the boycott, underlining that “Election Commission has include a religion column in voter forms and issued a separate list for Ahmadi voters, which is against the soul of joint electorate system”.
According to Muslim fundamentalists, the Ahmadi sect is heretical in so far a sit declares itself to be Muslim, but does not recognise Mohammad as the last prophet; this is why it is persecuted in Bangladesh and Indonesia too.
In 1985 the military dictator general Zia-ul-Haq subdivided the electorate into 5 groups according to religion (Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Ahmadi, Sikh, Buddhists and Parsi were grouped together), reserving seats for each group and forbidding cross group voting.
This system, a method of marginalising religious minorities (forced to choose between few candidates) continued until January 2002, when President Pervez Musharraf allowed non Muslims to vote for Islamic candidates in their province and increate seats in the National parliament to 342 and those in the 4 regional councils to 728, even though he didn’t increase seats for non Muslims despite the increase in their numbers since 1985.
This discrimination, writes the Ahmadi community, “is not only a stark violation of the fundamental rights guaranteed in our constitution and Pakistan's international human rights commitments but is also contrary to the spirit of justice and equality”.