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.
