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Thursday March 28, 2024

The rise of the right wing

By Hussain H Zaidi
November 25, 2017
The ascendency of right-wing parties has been the seminal political development that has taken place in recent years. The sit-in staged by the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLY) and like-minded parties – which has thrown life in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad into a tailspin for more than two weeks and given the protesters a toehold in the political market – should spring up no surprises.
Right-wing parties here may be classified into two categories. The first category comprises religio-political outfits, such as the two factions of the JUI, Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (JUP) and the JI. To these, we may add two new players that have appeared on the political horizon: the TLY and the Milli Muslim League (MML). Both these parties made their presence felt in the by-elections that were held in Lahore and Peshawar. The TLY bagged 7,130 votes in Lahore and 9,935 others from constituencies in Peshawar while the MML’s tally in the two by-polls was 5,822 and 3,557 votes, respectively.
The TLY represents the Barelvi sub-sect and was formed following the execution of Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer. The governor was gunned down by Qadri, 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 an unpardonable act.
The TLY’s dharna was also precipitated, on the face of it, by an inadvertent mistake in the Khatam-e-Nabuwwat oath for members of the national and provincial assemblies under the recently-enacted Elections Act, 2017. The error was subsequently rectified and there is no evidence that it was made by design. But it provided the TLY with enough ammunition to gun for the people responsible for the error. As it turns out, ordinary citizens are mainly bearing the brunt of this dharna.
Religious parties are strong proponents of subordinating politics to religion. These political outfits are eager to use the state machinery to make people ‘good’ Muslims – as per their interpretation – punish those who do not measure up to their standards and turn the country into an impregnable fortress of Islam.
The other right-wing category consists of mainstream conservative political parties like the PML-N and the PTI. Unlike religious parties, their support is broad-based and is not confined to a particular creed or sect. But they often make appeals to the religious vote bank and strike electoral alliances with religious outfits. These parties play on religious sentiments when they are to their advantage.
In the past, the PTI had been a vehement critic of Pakistan’s role of a frontline state in the war on terror. The party would brush aside a military solution to militancy and insist on unconditional negotiations with the Taliban until the December 2014 Army Public School tragedy, which made it politically untenable to persist with such a stance.
Of late, PTI Chairman Imran Khan and JUI-S Chief Maulana Samiul Haq – who is widely regarded as the ‘father of the Taliban’ – have apparently agreed to develop a joint strategy for the 2018 elections. Is there still any doubt about the PTI’s ideological leanings?
The PML-N has, in recent years, sought to reposition itself as the party of the centre-right. Before he was unseated, Nawaz Sharif had, on quite a few occasions, declared that he represented all the citizens and not merely Muslims – for which he was rounded on by the clergy. With Sharif in hot water, the PML-N is likely to continue to cast itself as a right-wing party.
The ascendency of the right-wing parties started with the 2013 general elections, which resulted in their overwhelming victory and the defeat of the progressive parties. The PML-N and the PTI bagged 149 National Assembly seats while the PPP, the MQM and the ANP collectively secured only 48 seats. As for the four provincial assemblies, the PML-N and the PTI jointly bagged 394 seats as compared with 116 seats won by the PPP, ANP and the MQM combined.
As we may recall, the progressive parties were forced to run subdued electoral campaigns after militants launched a series of attacks on their offices. On the other hand, the right-wing parties conducted their campaigns without let or hindrance. As a result, the polls were characterised by the absence of a level-playing field.
At present, the MQM is in tatters while the PPP has been demoted to a regional party. The ANP has almost always been confined to KP. The upcoming elections will largely be a contest among the right-wing parties.
For whatever reason, 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 polity like Pakistan. The edifice of such a society must rest on the pillars of a pluralistic philosophy, which accepts a diversity of beliefs, practices and codes without trying to reduce the diversity to a unity.
If the social order is to work smoothly in such societies, full religious freedom needs to be granted to all communities. The state must not discriminate on the basis of caste or creed and cultural diversity has to be reconciled with national unity. Above all, religion should not be used for political purposes because this invariably promotes the interests of a particular community at the expense of others. It should not be the business of the state to make people good Muslims. Instead, it should concern itself only with making them good, law-abiding citizens.
However, with the Objectives Resolution of 1949, religion has been strongly injected into the body politic. The Objectives Resolution, which purported to form the basis of the future constitution of Pakistan, sought to make the country a hybrid of Islamic and Western concepts of government.
Subsequent constitutions drew inspiration from this resolution. The Ziaul Haq-induced Eighth Amendment in 1985 made the resolution a substantive part of the constitution by inserting Article 2A. The significance of this is that now the principles and provisions of the Objectives Resolution are justiciable. The 1973 constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic Republic and made Islam the state religion. The highest offices of the state were also closed to non-Muslims as the president and prime minister were expected to be Muslims.
Later, through an amendment to the constitution, a parallel judicial system was created through the Federal Shariat Court (FSC). It was entrusted with determining the Islamic character of laws and examining and correcting any order passed by any criminal court under laws pertaining to the enforcement of the Hudood Ordinance.
Pakistan remains an overwhelmingly Muslim society. So, on the face of it, making Islam the state religion seems quite logical. But within Muslims, there are sects and sub-sects that have deep and, at times, irreconcilable doctrinal differences. Moreover, there are progressive and retrogressive and liberal and narrow interpretations of Islam. In case religion is given a paramount place in the polity, the foremost question is whether creed or interpretation should reign supreme.

The writer is a freelance contributor.
Email: hussainhzaidi@gmail.com