The Riots of 1953 — Page xiii
Foreword In February 1953, a series of violent demonstrations broke out across the Punjab in response to a widespread hate campaign against Pakistan’s Ahmadis. The riots lasted until April and were at their worst in the provincial capital of Lahore where the military had to be called in to quell the agitations. The citywide martial law which was imposed on 6 March was the first of its kind in Pakistan. In total, 20 people were killed in the violence. The province was also marred by widespread looting, arson, and common assault during the period of the riots. The founding members of Pakistan, led by their Quaid, Mu- hammad Ali Jinnah, were secularists in their principles and ideals yet throughout the independence movement their chief rallying cry was that of Islam. Religion presented itself as the common thread by which they were able to unite disparate Muslims of dif- ferent ethnicities, languages, and cultures. It also augmented the two-nation theory advanced by Jinnah to the British by which he argued that the chasm between the Muslims and Hindus of the subcontinent was so vast that they could not feasibly be ex- pected to live together in harmony. As soon as the country was formed, the role of Islam in the new polity assumed a prominent position in the national debate and religious groups like the Ja- maat-e-Islami, who had originally opposed its creation, seized the opportunity to advance their own theocratic version of statehood.