The JI and the jiyalas

The PPP is not quite the party it used to be and today there are more people in the vicinity who wince at the mere mention of it than perhaps at any moment in its history. The Jamaat-e-Islami has had its own little innocent compromises to strike along the way which has rid the JI of much of its purity and piety. Still the two have enough in them to clash in Karachi, in a hoarse homage to the era when they together defined politics in our neighbourhood.

There was a time when no third party mattered. Family lore has it that back when they were holding the first general election in the country in 1970, a conscientious elder was prepared to relax his principles in aid of a concession to a Jamaat candidate in a Karachi constituency. More than that, he tried to convince a visiting daughter to impersonate as an absent sister-in-law and vote for the supremacy of Islam against the menace of a socialist concoction promoted by Z A Bhutto. As the author of this particular tense family epic would have it, the lady refused to bow down to the command of her Mughal-e-Azam father, which exposed her to be dubbed as one of those wayward ZAB supporters.

There were other contenders in the fray even then, most notably Sheikh Mujibur Rehman — who incidentally is currently the subject of a grand image-cleaning drive partly because of a growing dislike for outside interference in politics and partly in the wake of the sheer contempt sections of Pakistanis have come to have for the style of ZAB’s political heirs.

There were other politicians around, more controversial than Bhutto to catch the fancy of those looking to break taboos. There were mythological characters such as the Sarhadi Gandhi, and the Baloch nationalists. For the less imaginative and less adventurous, there were the everyday soft ‘secular’ alternatives to ZAB, the Javed Iqbal and Mumtaz Daultana types pushing their credentials as safe options from the reliable Muslim leagues. But as ZAB’s star rose, both at home in Lahore as well as wherever our family travelled to, it was him against the cadres raised in Maulana Mawdudi’s nursery — the stiff, hard-core jamaatiyas.

The formula lasted for many years to come. One childhood moment that has stuck in the mind is that of a young PPP woman worker arguing heatedly with a bearded JI local leader inside an Islamabad constituency on the polling day in 1977. It was a patchwork of allies of all shades and colours who took on an ambitious PPP founder in that election. But in Islamabad where our family was temporarily living at the time, it was the JI versus the jiyalas as Prof Ghafoor Ahmed competed for the lone National Assembly seat in the capital against a PPP candidate named Raja Zahoor Ahmed.

The 1977 polls paved the way for Ziaul Haq’s martial law and, right on cue, the Jamaat was there to provide Bhutto’s nemesis with the ideological reinforcement he so badly needed. Not too long after when the dictator experimented with his own version of controlled democracy with a local government election in 1979, and indeed the Jamaat it was that presented itself as a natural ideological rival to Bhutto’s legacy in some of the most crucial regions of the country.

In beloved Lahore, where our family was back after a brief detour to the country’s capital, an ‘ awam dost’ candidate won the councillor’s vote in our locality in 1979. He was an ‘aam admi’ and a jiyala forced to camouflage himself politically to avoid Zia’s wrath, and his victory confirmed overwhelming support for the PPP. In our mohalla, however, the scene was sombre and celebrations suppressed in respect for a neighbour, a mild-mannered Akbari Mandi trader who had contested under you know which party’s umbrella.

The Jamaat performance in Lahore in particular in that election was far from flattering. Zia probably figured out then and there that he could not trust the JI to defeat the jiyalas for him and needed to invent an altogether new outfit less rigid in appearance to overpower his political enemy. This is how Nawaz Sharif was born but it took even Mian Sahab a long time to dictate terms. For a long time, it was the Jamaat which set the (decidedly PPP-centric) agenda here and in return, many JI stalwarts got prominence as election candidates enjoying the blessings of the Sharifs. Nawaz Sharif was viewed as a simpleton power aspirant until the time he showed his true mettle as a politician, gradually outgrowing the jamaatiya influence.

The Jamaat has tried, desperately ever since. At least in Punjab, however, its leaders chose to pursue a policy which prevented them from ever seriously challenging the old benefactors in the PML-N. As the PPP was discredited, it was eventually the PTI, which was once dubbed as a good-looking Jamaat-e-Islami, that filled the void.

On a country-wide level, the JI has been looking for an inspirational leader just as it has been trying to adjust ideologically in its own peculiar way. Hafiz Naeem in Karachi did seem to be a possibility. Whether he lives up to the billing as a more moderate — and hence more acceptable — Jamaat face and whether he is going to be an option on offer to the people in the near future will largely depend on who else is allowed to take part in the race. He has proven one thing though: his ability to, even if briefly, bring back an era where his party and the PPP defined the divide.

It is a pity that a party as worldly as the PPP, with its own prince at helm and its own Machiavellis guiding it, failed to see what Hafiz Naeem could be up to. All meaningful work is done at the grassroots. All the PPP needed to ensure was that it won enough numbers at the time of the election for the councillors.

The writer is a senior journalist.