Pandit Lekh Ram (April 1858 – 6 March 1897) was a 19th-century social reformer, publicist, and writer from Punjab, India.

Lekh Ram's outspoken views and writings made him a controversial figure, and he faced opposition and violence from conservative Hindus and Muslims.

His assassination by an unidentified assailant on 6 March 1897 is believed by Ahmadi Muslims to have occurred in accordance with Ahmad's prophecy concerning him.

He served in the Punjab Police for some years, and when posted at Peshawar, he came under the influence of the teachings of Munshi Kanhaiya Lal Alakhdhari and learned of the Arya Samaj movement and its founder Dayanand Saraswati.

He resigned the Police service voluntarily and devoted his life for the propagation of Vedas and became a preacher of Punjab Arya Pratinidhi Sabha.

[8] While Dayanand Saraswati's polemics against Islam largely addressed doctrinal issues, later Samaj writers, including Lekh Ram, drew more heavily upon historical conflicts between Hindus and Muslims as well as the communal tensions of nineteenth century Punjab in an attempt to tie them with Islamic doctrine.

Unlike their disputes with the Christians, the struggle between the Samajists and the Muslims quickly came to centre around two figures—Lekh Ram himself, representing the Samaj as a reformed Hinduism, and Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), the founder of the Ahmadiyya movement which claimed to be a revitalized Islam.

[10] When Ahmad published the Surma-i-Chashm-i-Arya (Antimony to Open the Eyes of the Aryas), Lekh Ram wrote Nuskha-i-Khabt-i-Ahmadiyya (A Prescription for the Madness of the Ahmadiyya).

[13] The treatise—which drew and expanded upon Dayanand's Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth), a work which also criticized Christianity, Buddhism and Sikhism—accused Islam of being a warlike and sensual faith and escalated already existing communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims in the early 1890s.

[14] Amid the polemical exchanges, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad published an announcement in 1893 in which he prophesied that Lekh Ram will face divine punishment and die in violent circumstances within six years, speaking of him as a "lifeless bellowing calf",[15][16] and stated that the fateful day will be very close to the Muslim festival of Eid.

[17] Four years later, on 6 March 1897, the day following Eid, Lekh Ram was stabbed to death[18] while staying in Lahore, purportedly by a Muslim.

His assassination caused a great shock among the Arya Samaj throughout the Punjab and his funeral drew an estimated 20,000 people at the burning ghat.

[23] The assassination also intensified communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims in the months that followed and generated a heightened sense of trepidation among both with mutual threats, boycotts and cases of street violence between rival groups.

[24] For his part, Ahmad maintained that he had no hand in the fulfillment of the prophecy other than through purely spiritual means[25] and although he was suspected by some, nothing could be proven.