Not just Imran, small parties are winners, too

If PML-N (Pakistan Muslim League — Nawaz) loses Punjab, it will be primarily because of the religious vote,” prominent analyst and professor of political science at Lahore University of Management Science Rasul Bakhsh Rais told me during a short interview just ahead of the election. And as the Punjab result was balanced on a knife-edge, and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and the PML-N were promising independent candidates and small parties the sky for helping them form the provincial government, the latter could be clearly seen regretting the loss of the far-right religious vote.

“We should have been more conscious of the religious right, which traditionally formed our core voting constituency, breaking away in the last two years or so,” lamented a PML-N worker. Of all the religious parties that contested the general election — and there were plenty — the newest entrant made the most prominent impact. The controversial the TLP (Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan) won only two provincial seats from Sindh, but bagged 2.23 million votes in the national assembly election and more than 2.38 million votes in the provinces, putting it firmly at number three (after PTI and PML-N) in many parts of the country.

On the face of it, TLP came into being after the hanging of former Punjab governor Salman Taseer’s murderer Mumtaz Qadri. Qadri, Taseer’s bodyguard, gunned him down in broad daylight in January 2011 and was subsequently celebrated by extreme rightwing religious groups across the country. But when the PML-N government refused to commute Qadri’s death sentence and hanged him in February 2016, its conservative vote bank not only split but also openly rebelled. But that is only half the story.

Anybody who remembers the 2014 Peshawar school massacre would not have forgotten how the country’s elite met the next day and hammered out a National Action Plan (NAP) to take this particular bull by the horns once and for all. An essential part of NAP was a national narrative that would set the record straight and distance the government from religious extremism, which had seeped deep into society after decades of official patronage.

Not much later, though, a number of religious outfits, including banned groups, were registering as political parties to partake in a few by-elections. Prominent among them were an affiliate of Hafiz Saeed’s Jamaatud-Dawa, known as the Milli Muslim League (MML), and the TLP. Interestingly, despite only days on the political radar, the TLP ended number-3, behind the PTI and the PML-N but ahead of the PPP, in four major byelections. And since pretty much everything right-ofcentre has been the military’s ‘jurisdiction’ ever since the famous anti-Soviet Afghan jihad all those years ago no points for guessing who everybody held responsible for this surprise. The narrative, then, was not about distancing the government from the mullah lobby at all, it was about mainstreaming them.

Any lingering suspicion was promptly removed when the TLP blocked a vital highway linking Islamabad to Rawalpindi for almost a month; its leader Khadim Rizvi openly spewed venom on the government and state institutions, besides repeatedly abusing senior officials and the supreme court chief justice. The government was paralysed. The judiciary — seemingly on steroids because of its suo motto binge — hardly noticed. And when the TLP destroyed public property, the army stepped in to bail them out, giving every participant a thousand rupees for going home. All cases against them, needless to say, were duly dropped. Suddenly, there was serious, high-level security for Rizvi as he abused his way from city to city on the election campaign. Curiously, he and most other religious parties called to boycott PML-N, equating voting for them with sin. Naturally this led local and foreign media to notice a ‘my enemy’s enemy’ type of convergence of interests.

Sometimes numbers do not tell the complete truth. True, religious parties made a negligible impact on the general election if you see the bigger picture — clinching barely over 9 per cent of national assembly votes. But scratch the surface a little and at least one of them is quite prominent and rapidly expanding. They did not get many seats in their first big outing but did manage to help unseat one of the longest reigning parties. In Punjab, especially, the winning margin of the PTI, in many constituencies, was less than the votes bagged by the TLP, a one-time guaranteed PML-N vote bank.

More importantly, it has been firmly established as a centrepiece of that national narrative that was, ironically, supposed to distance extremist religious doctrine from mainstream social and political discourse.

Religious parties made a negligible impact on the general election. But scratch the surface a little and you will see at least one of them is quite prominent