A one-and-a-half-year-old was buried on Wednesday, four days after she died from pneumonia in Toba Tek Singh. The family said that Muslim residents of the area had refused to let them bury the child in the neighbourhood graveyard because “she was born to an Ahmedi family”.
The child was finally buried on a land donated by a Muslim resident of the village, some 300 metres away from the graveyard.
The settlement was reached after the family of the deceased child staged a protest demonstration.
The family, a resident of Chak 312-JB Kathowali in Gojra, said that they had prepared the body for the burial in the neighbourhood graveyard. On Sunday, they said, some men stopped the funeral on its way to the graveyard and told them that they could not bury the child there.
The family said they were told that the villagers had decided not to let any person from the Ahmadia community bury their dead at the graveyard.
The family placed the body on the main road and sat around it. The sit-down continued for three days before police arrived at the scene and talked to both side.
After negotiations between both sides, police said, the child’s family agreed to bury the girl on land donated by Yaqoob Ranjha, a Muslim resident of the village and a neighbour of the deceased child. The land is 300 metres from the old graveyard.
Station House Officer Rana Muhammad Yar told The Express Tribune that the dispute was resolved amicably. He said no FIR was registered against anyone.
He said the police had tried to avert an untoward situation.
Talking to The Express Tribune, Waheed Ahmad, the child’s father, said that hers was the first ‘Ahmadi grave’ in the area.
Earlier, he said, all members of his family had been buried in the village graveyard along with their Muslim neighbours. He said it was the first time the villagers had objected to burying an Ahmadi in the village graveyard.
Ahmad, a daily wage labourer, said nearly Ahmadi families in Kathowali settled in the area in 1947. Most of them, he said, had migrated to Germany, Canada, the UK and the USA.
He said there had been no altercation between the Ahmedis and the Muslims in the village. He said there had been instances where people from both sides attended each other’s weddings and funerals.
“The situation got bad over the last few weeks, when a group of people in the village started a campaign against Ahmadis declaring them wajibul qatal. They had been asking other villagers to boycott Ahmadis and stop accepting our invitations,” Ahmed said.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 26th, 2013.