Pakistan caught between mosque and military, again
Husain Haqqani 26 November, 2017
Army chief General Qamar Bajwa seems to be against the military’s direct intervention in politics but Khadim Rizvi and his cohorts have been making insinuations that the general might not belong to the right sect. The Ahmedi card
If the history of Pakistan was made into a movie, one scene would be repeated several times albeit with a new cast of characters each time: fanatics rioting in streets over some religious issue, civilian leaders attempting to alternately appease and suppress them only to discover that the situation cannot be resolved without military intervention, and the military being portrayed by its ubiquitous supporters as the country’s only saviour. As repeated ad nauseam, this is an army, which has a country instead of the other way around !
The recent troubles began when some three thousand supporters of a firebrand cleric, “many armed with sticks and iron rods,” according to wire service reports, blocked the main entrance to Islamabad since November 6. Led by Khadim Hussain Rizvi, the colourful leader of the Sunni extremist Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP), the protestors demanded strict adherence to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and stricter laws against other religious sects.
A sit-in by three thousand people in a country with a population of 210 million should not be a serious threat either to law and order or to the stability of the government. But Pakistan is, and has always has been different from the rest of the world.
Rizvi, who laces his speeches with four-letter words and choicest Punjabi language abuses, is the self-appointed guardian of the ‘Prophet’s honour.’ He is also the latest Pakistani religious-political leader to rail against Hindu and Jewish agents in addition to speaking about fighting alongside the Pakistan army for Islam and Pakistan. He is the perfect candidate for mainstreaming in Paki politics
Rizvi’s followers were responsible for the murder of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer who was murdered by his own bodyguard in January 2011 for suggesting that Pakistanis debate their blasphemy laws. He is one of many Sunni Barelvi clerics that were built up by Pakistan’s military-intelligence complex under the Musharraf dictatorship, and in the years since, as potentially moderate alternatives to Deobandi and Wahabi clerics who had been supported by the Pakistani state under General Ziaul Haq and during the 1990s. A shade "less green" than Maulana Diesel
The timing of Rizvi’s relatively small sit-in with larger consequences is interesting. It came after the disqualification of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his re-election as leader of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-N, and the rejection by parliament of a bill that would have made it unlawful for political parties to be headed by someone disqualified to be a member of parliament.
Rizvi called the protests over changes to electoral laws, which he claimed unacceptably altered the language of the oath for lawmakers declaring Prophet Muhammad as God’s final prophet. The original language was restored and the government said it was a clerical error any way but that was not enough to calm Rizvi’s blood thirsty followers from threatening violence.
Author Herbert Feldman had written at the end of Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s ten-year dictatorship of a sad fact of political life in Pakistan. Ayub had handed power over to his successor as army commander, General Yahya Khan, at the end of five months of rioting. In Pakistan, Feldman wrote, there was a widespread feeling that “whenever it was felt in General Headquarters that things were not going according to the taste and opinion of senior officers, the armed forces (in effect the army alone) would move in or contrive to do so”.
Army chief General Qamar Bajwa seems to be against the military’s direct intervention in politics but Rizvi and his cohorts have been making insinuations (totally unjustified) that the general might not belong to the right sect. He would have to be careful in tackling the situation in an emotionally charged environment wherein his own faith is under question. This opinion piece was written prior to the Law Minister's resignation !
PS: Haqqani should wait !. More chapters than this alone would need to be added to his book !!For those who wish to understand the broader nexus between the mullahs and ambitious military officers, I have already written the book ‘Pakistan Between Mosque and Military.’ It seems that I might have to add a new chapter to the book, which was only updated a year ago.