The government, which blew hot and cold, said it had finally worked out a secret deal with the TLP. Except, the deal isn’t all too secret. Inside information suggests the government has agreed to retract on its decision to proscribe the TLP, allow the group to contest elections, remove its activists from the Fourth Schedule and release its imprisoned activists.
The only win for the government, if it can be called that, is making the TLP agree to dropping its demand that Pakistan cut off diplomatic ties with France.
The police personnel, yet again, are the collateral damage. According to official figures as reported in the media, five policemen were murdered and 520 injured by the TLP mob with the intent of murdering them. Seventeen policemen were badly injured and at least four are said to have received bullet injuries.
There has been much comment in the media with reference to the government’s surrender to the TLP. As I noted in this space last week, the government did not have even half-decent options to deal with the situation. Notwithstanding the bluster, the use of force was never really an option. Effective use of force, or to put it differently, translating the use of force into utility of force has at least two prerequisites: the ability of the government to isolate the group(s) it wants to use force against and garner public buy-in for that. Neither condition was met in TLP’s case.
As Umair Javed, a sociologist, noted in his Dawn article, “What makes the TLP different is both its geography and its ideology. It is a movement that is more rooted in urban and peri-urban Punjab than any previous religio-political one.” While one can debate the issue of geography (for instance, the Counterterrorism Department has effectively dealt with sectarian terrorist groups in the Punjab), ideology certainly plays a crucial role because of its central reference to Namoos-e Risalat (Prophet’s [PBUH] honour). This is a benchmark that goes beyond denominational differences and in many cases also cuts across class differences. It generates numbers and sympathy. When you have numbers in the geography Javed referred to, isolating the group becomes that much more difficult. Corollary: so does the use of force.
But this is not all. The Barelvi reference to the Prophet’s (PBUH) honour is not a new phenomenon. The Barelvi organisation in the form of the TLP certainly is. And that is where my past week’s reference to manipulation by the internal wing of the ISI comes in. This is no speculation, as the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s February 2019 detailed judgement shows and which is on record for anyone to read. Also, a matter of record is the fact that the current PTI government, which was then in the opposition, not just cheered the TLP because the latter humiliated the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government, but gave statements in support of the TLP and its agenda.
Even as the TLP was gearing for a march on Islamabad, The PTI government in the Punjab adopted a resolution seeking inclusion of oath of Khatm-i-Nabuwwat in the nikah (marriage) documents. The prime minister himself has made a number of statements that are straight out of the Barelvi (read: TLP) playbook.
A number of analysts have recently asked the question of how long it will be before the TLP emerges as a more potent political force. Well, here’s the bad news: even the current political parties that do get the popular vote have adopted or backed measures and legislation that belong in the TLP’s Book of Armaments, to use a term from Monty Python. To the extent of ideology, the TLP is already here. The rest is about political power and the TLP certainly has its eye on that.
It won’t get there, misplaced panic aside. But the TLP can continue to feed itself on the games the agencies play. That, as I noted last week, must stop. The state can disrupt this group, but for that it must first decide that it has become a Frankenstein that needs to be put down. While I won’t press the analogy with the MQM, it is useful, nonetheless, in terms of understanding how the Augean stable can be cleansed.
The police personnel, yet again, are the collateral damage. According to official figures as reported in the media, five policemen were murdered and 520 injured by the TLP mob with the intent of murdering them. Seventeen policemen were badly injured and at least four are said to have received bullet injuries.
Meanwhile, let me reproduce what Aqeel Karim Dhedhi, a businessman and stock trader who was part of the negotiating team told Kamran Khan, an anchor. “In our country, when a mob is on the move, who can tell who has killed whom. Killing has happened on both sides, but we will have to forget these killings. We have to move forward now. We cannot put the country at stake just because eight or ten people have been killed.”
These lines, a rough translation of what Dhedhi said, are instructive in terms of where the state stands and how utterly bankrupt it is now. When Mr Dhedhi says “who can tell who has killed whom”, he is creating a false equivalence between the police personnel and the violent, lawless mobs. If the state is prepared to accept that equivalence, what message is it sending to the law enforcement personnel? Should we be surprised if tomorrow the LEA personnel refuse to deal with violent mobs? Mr Dheedhi’s comment that we have to move forward and cannot put the country at stake for a few killed is even more disturbing — who has the murdered policemen’s blood on their hands; TLP or those who have nourished the group for their political games? Should even a half-decent state bring itself to a state where the only way for it to move forward is by brushing aside the murders of those who died trying to establish its writ?
The use of religious symbolism is a dangerous game to play. Governments in this country have resorted to it for decades. What we witness today, the space shrunk for any rational discourse, as also the resort to violence by religious mobs, is a direct consequence of that ill-considered policy. No one can play the religion card better than those whose politics is steeped in religion. The only way to correct the course is to deoxygenate such groups. That requires depoliticising religion, not further religionising politics.