Top Economists Quit Imran Khan’s Council in Solidarity With Ahmadi Economist

The removal of noted economist Atif R. Mian came even as the PTI leaders had claimed that they would not “bow down to extremists.”

New Delhi: In a victory for religious bigotry that has left liberal Pakistanis seething, a renowned economist has been removed from Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Economic Advisory Council because he happens to belong to the Ahmadi faith.

Atif R. Mian, 43, a professor of economics at Princeton University and described by Dawn as “the only Pakistani to be considered among International Monetary Fund’s ‘top 25 brightest young economists’” was dropped from the EAC on Friday after several days of pressure from Islamist groups. Senator Faisal Javed Khan tweeted the information, adding that a “replacement would be announced later.”


Earlier in the week, Mian had been targeted through a malicious online campaign, for belonging to the Ahmadi community, officially considered non-Muslims by the Pakistani state.

Within hours of the news breaking, however, two other members of the EAC, the Harvard economist Asim Ijaz Khwaja and University of London economist Imran Rasul tweeted their decision to quit the high-level panel in protest over Mian’s ouster.

His removal came even as the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government had claimed that they would not “bow down to extremists.” Pakistan’s information minister, Fawad Chaudhary, had asserted that Pakistan “belongs to minorities as much as it belongs to the majority”.

Dawn reports:

Chaudhry had taken to Twitter to recall that “Quaid e Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah appointed Sir Zafar Ullah [also an Ahmadi] as Foreign minister of Pakistan; we’ll follow [the] principles of Mr Jinnah, not of extremists.”

His thoughts were echoed by Minister of Human Rights Shireen Mazari, who tweeted: “Exactly. Well put indeed. Time to reclaim space for the Quaid’s Pakistan!”.

However, in a tweet on September 7, he said “The government wants to move forward alongside scholars and all social groups, and it is inappropriate if a single nomination creates an impression to the contrary.”


As per the Dawn report, in the subsequent tweet, he added that according to Prime Minister Imran Khan, the ideal state is that of ‘Madina’ and that he and the members of his cabinet hold Prophet Muhammad in high esteem.

There are an estimated one million Ahmadis living in Pakistan. Though they consider themselves Muslims, they are, by law, prohibited from identifying themselves because some of their beliefs, especially on the finality of Prophet Muhammad, runs counter to popular belief.

The community has been targeted by Islamist politicians right from Pakistan’s creation in 1947 but the first official policies against them were adopted by the ‘left-leaning’ government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. In 1974, he declared the Ahmadis ‘non-Muslim’ by statute. Later, Zia ul Haq, the dictator who had Bhutton hanged, went one step further and made it a crime fior Ahmadis to refer to themselves as Muslims. In recent years, the community and its places of worship have been targeted by terrorists.

In an editorial in which it said “Atif Mian’s removal has dealt another blow to Jinnah’s vision of a tolerant & inclusive Pakistan”, Dawn wrote:

The historical record incontrovertibly demonstrates that concessions to religious zealots further erode the space for rational discourse and decision-making. With profound governance challenges, a divided polity and a political landscape that is plagued by anti-democratic interference and other problems, no one party can take up the challenge of confronting religious extremism. But as security policymakers debate the political mainstreaming of some extant militant networks, there has been a question whether it is, in fact, extremism that is being mainstreamed in Pakistan.

The religious far right in the country has been mobilised in a manner that ought to worry all right-thinking citizens: short-sighted concessions and manipulations by the state will have far-reaching consequences for society.

Calling the Imran Khan government’s decision to drop Atif Mian a “pitiful surrender”, The Nation editorialised:

What is most worrying is that this decision displays PTI’s lack of grit, indicating that the party will be unable to withstand pressure from religious groups in the future as well, which will only become more violent and active now that their demands are met.  This classical U-turn by the government, for the likes of extremist parties, will only come back to haunt it in the future.

Thus, it seems we are resigned once again to a situation where bigotry, hate and divisiveness won, instead of waking up to a Naya Pakistan, the one envisioned by our founders, where Muslims and non-Muslims can live peacefully side by side without discrimination. We wonder if we ever will.

The News in its editorial wrote, “This blatant cowering to the religious Right does not bode well for the much lauded EAC, which was supposed to comprise the cream of Pakistan’s economists and the private sector.”