The data from the 2023 Census released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics contains a startling revelation, with alarming levels of Ahmadi population erosion across the country, especially in KP and Balochistan. Compared to the 2017 Census, which was conducted merely six years ago, the Ahmadi population in all four provinces has diminished dramatically. The worst affected provinces have been Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.
Whereas the total population in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa increased by 33% in the last six years - from 30 million to 40 million - the total population of Ahmadis in the province has diminished by 85%. According to the Census bureau, the entire Ahmadi population in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is merely 951 individuals. This stands in stark contrast to the census results of 1998, where the Ahmadi population in the province was found to be 0.24% of the entire population of the province, or around 42,500 individuals.
Similarly, although Balochistan’s population increased by 18% over the past six years, 74% of the entire Ahmadi population of the province had disappeared in 2023, compared to 2017. According to the latest census, the largest province of Pakistan by land area is home to only 557 Ahmadis. This also stands in stark contrast to the 1998 census, which suggested almost 10,000 Ahmadi individuals living in Balochistan.
The situation is not much better in either Punjab or Sindh, which both saw a decline in the Ahmadi population within the last six years, even though both provinces had a steady increase in their overall populations. The overall Ahmadi population in the country has decreased by 15% over the past 6 years, a 2.53% decrease every year. This goes against the overall trend of population increase in Pakistan, with the overall population in the country increasing from 208 million in 2017 to 240 million in 2023, an increase of 16%.
Hostile organizations such as TLP have had free reign to ravage and ransack Ahmadi properties and places of worship, where 2023 saw the largest desecration of Ahmadi properties in the last 4 decades.
Using the census figures from 1998 and comparing them with the latest census figures of 2023 paints an even bleaker picture for the future of Ahmadi Community in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 98% of the Ahmadi population has been obliterated relative to the 1998 census results, which shows that the population in the province has been cleansed of its Ahmadi community. This is not surprising, as the state’s official policy seems to be to completely dismantle the community, and it has used the most powerful weapon that a modern-day state has in its disposal to drive national policy: the Constitution.
In addition, hostile organizations such as TLP have had free reign to ravage and ransack Ahmadi properties and places of worship, where 2023 saw the largest desecration of Ahmadi properties in the last 4 decades. Peshawar in KPK has seen one of the largest upticks of attacks on Ahmadis since the census of 2017, and a large number of Ahmadi population of KPK has been internally displaced - forced to relocate to safer areas in neighboring provinces, or externally displaced by leaving the country.
Similarly, using figures from the 2023 census, Balochistan has seen its Ahmadi population diminish by 94% when compared to the 1998 census figures. The situation is both alarming and despondent. Similar to the recent uptick in persecution in Peshawar and KPK, Quetta and Balochistan have seen violent waves of persecution against Ahmadis in the early 2000s, which explains a rapid rate of Ahmadi population decline in the region compared to 1998.
Despite the community being driven to near extinction in large parts of Pakistan, the Ahmadi card continues to be rampantly played in all corridors of power across Pakistan, and does not seem to go out of fashion. It’s ironic that a community that gave the country its first Nobel Laureate and its first foreign minister has been hemorrhaged into nothingness.
The onslaught has been ruthless, and has used a three-dimensional policy of attacking the community through the use of constitutional persecution, legal discrimination through Ordinance XX, and informal religious extremist groups.
The results of this census, although surprising for presenting such a dramatic rate of decline, remain within the realm of the imaginable, as there are almost no instances of a religious community being persecuted anywhere around the globe the way the Ahmadis have been targeted in Pakistan, through both legal and illicit means.
In the modern nation-state, there is nothing more powerful than a country’s Constitution and penal code; both instruments signal the kind of policy that the state envisions. Unfortunately, the state of Pakistan, through those channels, has made it abundantly clear that its official policy is to drive Ahmadis into extinction.
There is an argument to be made that the inherent nature of the second Amendment coupled with Ordinance XX of 1984 is such that it is destined to obliterate the Ahmadi community from Pakistan. Such legal frameworks that enable persecution would condemn any target community to be disbanded and annihilated over time.
Some might argue that it is a wonder that the Ahmadi community has been able to survive as long as it did in Pakistan in the face of a multidimensional onslaught. However, given past trends, and the state’s failure to control groups like TLP, the Ahmadi population’s withering has seen an unprecedented rise, hastening the process of their comprehensive erosion. It seems to be the writing on the wall, based on official government statistics and past trends, that the Ahmadis are likely to be wiped out completely in provinces like Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan in the near future, and given the rising patronage of extremist organizations such as TLP in Sindh and Punjab, it is only a matter of time that even in those provinces, Ahmadis would be confined to a few urban centers, until they are pressured to completely disappear into oblivion.
A predominantly proselytizing religious community like the Ahmadiyya movement, with a missionary tradition, might be too proud to admit the damage that the Second Amendment and Ordinance XX has caused it in Pakistan, but their eradication in the country has been systematic and organized, and that information is clearly backed by the underlying census records and the exodus of the community members fleeing from Pakistan.
In the modern nation-state, there is nothing more powerful than a country’s Constitution and penal code; both instruments signal the kind of policy that the state envisions. Unfortunately, the state of Pakistan, through those channels, has made it abundantly clear that its official policy is to drive Ahmadis into extinction. The mode of ethnic cleansing is not immediate or necessarily as bloody, but it is potent and enough to systematically uproot an entire community that punched beyond its weight for Pakistan, and gave the nation its best and brightest.
Immediate action is needed by all stakeholders in corridors of power to protect the Ahmadi community from getting totally obliterated in Pakistan.
The definition of genocide according to the UN includes both a mental element of an “intent to destroy, whole or in part, a religious group,” as well as a physical element of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” It can be argued that the intent element of the Ahmadi genocide in Pakistan is fulfilled through laws such as the Second Amendment and Ordinance XX, and the physical element is fulfilled through repetitive attacks on Ahmadi persons, property and worship places, which has resulted in a massive Ahmadi exodus, and has brought about their destruction in part, depicted by official government census records.
The ruling elite and the judicial system protecting laws that enable systematic obliteration of a religious community in Pakistan can take a leaf out of US history, and see for themselves the legacy of the people and organizations who stood up against oppression, such as the Civil Rights Movement. History remembers the likes of Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, but does not look too kindly upon those who were in favor of perpetuating such institutional forms of racism and bigotry. The true test of judicial and legislative activism in Pakistan rests on delivering the country from such atrocious and barbaric laws.
Immediate action is needed by all stakeholders in corridors of power to protect the Ahmadi community from getting totally obliterated in Pakistan. In case no tangible actions are taken, and things are left as they are, the country is likely going to push its entire Ahmadi population into oblivion – a legacy that would be hard for the Land of the Pure to escape for decades to come.