Home Critical Analysis/Archives Report on Punjab Disturbances of 1953

To sum up. The circumstances that led to the proclamation of Martial Law were:—

(1) The complete breakdown of administrative machinery and total collapse of civil power, resulting in the Punjab Government’s statement of 6th March that it accepted the demands.

(2) The magnitude and intensity of the disorder, which led to this breakdown.

(3) The magnitude and intensity of the disorder was directly attributable to the circumstance that Government had lost all respect and that a religious complexion had been given to the demands and widespread belief sedulously inculcated in the masses that Ahmadis were detracting from the status of the Holy Prophet and impairing a basic doctrine in Islam.

(4) That nobody realised the implications of the demands, and if any one did so, he was not, out of fear of unpopularity or loss of political support, willing to explain these implications to the public.

(5) That the demands were presented in such a plausible form that in view of the emphasis that had come to be laid on anything that could even be remotely related to Islam or Islamic State, nobody dared oppose them, not even the Central Government which, for the several months during which the agitation had, with all its implications, been manifesting itself, did not make even a single public pronouncement on the subject.