TLP: - From Inception to Induction

 

Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan aka TLP was formed on 1 August 2015 by the late Allama Khadim Hussain Rizvi. Since the inception in the political stream TLP has always championed the cause of Khatm-e-Nabuwat and Namoos-e -Risalat but all this through violence and it has always been a tradition of our religious parties that they resort to violence and ransacking of the public property and in the end they usually get clean chits from our old school courts. 

This article explores the evolution and political activism of the Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP), a religio-political group, from a protest movement to a political party, while retaining its character as a movement. Consequently, TLP has a hybrid structure where the lines between the movement and party are blurred. As a movement, TLP used protests and agitation for their political agenda, while utilizing the political structures to demand or block policies deemed detrimental to its religious interests. The emergence of TLP is a by-product of post-9/11 religio-political developments in Pakistan and the changing patterns of state patronage towards religious groups.

TLP represents the Barelvi sub-sect, the largest Muslim sub-sect in Pakistan. The party gets its inspiration from the execution of Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer. The governor was gunned down by one of his guards for being critical of the blasphemy law. In the eye of a considerable section of society, even a soft criticism of the blasphemy law is itself blasphemous and thus constitutes an unpardonable act.

The execution of Mumtaz Qadri and the promulgation of the Election Act, 2017 – which catapulted the TLP into popular politics took place when the PML-N, Barelvis’ first electoral choice, was in the saddle. The TTP’s rise was also aided by the changing political ethos under which politics has become largely a squalid affair in which demonizing rivals, showing zero tolerance for dissent, and the ability to command mindless submission from supporters have come to be prized as the foremost virtues of a leader. The TLP made adroit use of social media where the audience is remarkably impressionable and can be beguiled with myth-spinning without much ado.

The TLP was allotted crane as its election symbol in 2017. In its inaugural general elections in 2018, the TLP fielded 571 candidates including 178 for the National Assembly. Although it secured only two provincial assembly seats significantly enough, both in Karachi the party emerged as the fifth largest party nationwide with 2.2 million votes, accounting for 4.2 percent of the total votes cast, narrowly behind the relatively moderate alliance of MMA’s 2.56 million votes. In the Punjab province and the two biggest cities each, the TLP finished third in terms of votes obtained.

In order to explain the rise of the TLP, we need to briefly and broadly take stock of the circumstances that are crucial for a political parties’ birth and growth. Typically, these include political ideology, creed, ethnicity, location, caste or race and social class. In Pakistan, a multiethnic, multi-faith society, creed (religion or sect) and ethnicity have constituted far more significant cleavages than social class. This explains why society has not yet seen the rise of a workers’ party.

This has been at work in the case of the rise of the TLP as well. Barelvi political parties, such as the JUP, have contested national elections since 1970. The electoral appeal of these relatively moderate parties remained largely confined to urban Sindh, notably Karachi. Other sects or sub-sects have also had their political parties. Over the years, the electorate has not been much impressed with religious parties and overwhelmingly voted for the mainstream political parties. The rise of the MQM in the mid-1980s strengthened the ethnic cleavage in urban Sindh at the expense of religious parties. As a result, parties like the JUP were reduced to a rump. In other parts of the country, the Barelvi vote bank was mainly captured by the PML-N. Despite the presence of the Barelvi-Deobandi cleavage, an electorally viable political party could not be mobilized. The efforts of Allama Tahirul Qadri, a renowned Barelvi scholar who founded the Pakistani Awami Tehreek, to make a niche for himself in electoral politics also came to grief. Disillusioned with the electorate, he reposed his faith in agitation politics.

Unlike most mainstream parties, the TLP’s leadership is drawn from the lower middle and bottom of the economic heap. Rizvi himself was a man of humble origins. Those two factors placed him in an excellent position to garner support of the underprivileged sections of society. The combination of religion and economics that the TLP represents may turn out formidable if the people are convinced that their economic plight is underpinned by the prevalence of an ‘un-Islamic’ culture and system.
The violence of TLP finally met its last blow as the PTI government has issued a notification to ban the ultra-right-wing party under the anti-terrorism laws and has been inducted in the list of proscribed organizations. The interior ministry issued a notification declaring TLP as a proscribed organization on the pretext of threat to National security after the federal cabinet approved a summary to ban the party and Saad Hussain Rizvi has been placed in the fourth schedule under the anti-terrorism act 1997. The National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) has recommended the government to take over madrassas operated by the TLP and crack down on its sources of funding.

Many political pundits and defense analysts fear that although government has banned TLP but it can regroup and organize again under a new name as this has been a traditional practice in Pakistan as we have the examples of Sipah-e-Sahaba and Jama’at-ud-Da'wah which are now working under the names of  Millat-e-Islamia and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba respectively and lastly the rise of right-wing politics is a matter of grave concern, because mixing religion and politics is a dangerous game for a multi-creed territory like Pakistan.