Ahmadiyya puts Pakistan’s PM Khan in tough test

Ahmed Lamloum

New Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has started implementing his electoral program. The new premier pledged in his campaign to create 4.5 million jobs for Pakistani youth during his tenure.

The former cricket player has already formed a team of aides to help him honor this pledge. Nevertheless, Khan kicked Atif Mian, a Noble Prize in economics nominee, out of his advisory council because he belonged to the marginalized Ahmadiyya Movement. This brought intense criticism to the premier.

Rahimullah Yusufzai, a senior Pakistani security and political analyst who writes for the English language newspaper The News, said Khan should have thought well before including Mian in his advisory council.  

“Nonetheless, he should never reverse his decision to kick him out of the council,” Yusufzai told The Reference. “Otherwise, this will be a bad start for him, one that will give the impression to people that Khan’s government is a weak one.”

He said Khan used to take pride in Mian being one of the top 25 economists in the world. But that, he said, was when Khan was a member of the Pakistani opposition.

Yusufzai said kicking Mian out of the advisory council of the prime minister shows that Khan was under intense pressure from everybody, including his backers.

“But this sends the message that his government is incapable of confronting criticism and that he is ready to reconsider his decisions, even if they are politically-right,” he said.

Pakistani writer Khan Zaman Karkar asked about the type of pressures the prime minister could have been subjected to before he took the decision to kick Mian out of his advisory council.

This is only a strategy, he said, followed by the deep state through the mobilization of the public.

“The term ‘public pressure’ always refers to the deep state that mobilizes the public whenever there is a threat to its interests,” Karkar told The Reference.

Those opposing Mian’s selection within the advisory council of the prime minister launched a massive campaign on social media. They especially focused on the Ahmadiyya Movement. However, some social media users called for putting Mian’s scientific and professional qualifications into consideration when judging him, not his social affiliations.

Who is master?

Bahraini specialist in Asian affairs Abdullah Ahmed al-Madani said the decision to kick Mian out of the advisory council proves that Mr Khan is not the master of himself.

“He is a victim of the traditional pressures of the military,” al-Madani said. “The military brought him to power, even as he ostensibly won free and fair elections.”

He added that Khan is also under pressure from the Islamist movements that were allied to him one day.

Another economist, namely Imran Rasul, who is a professor of economics at the British College, also resigned from the advisory council on September 8, in protest against sacking Mian out of the council.

He wrote on Twitter that judging people in the light of their religious affiliations violated everything he believed in.

In April, Ahmadiyya Movement released a statement in which it complained against increasing hostilities against its members, as a religious minority.

Some of the members of the movement, it said in the statement, were randomly detained before they voted in the general elections.

Followers of the Ahmadiyya Movement, which was founded in 1889, consider its founder Mirza Ghulam a prophet.