In Pakistan, a Tale of Two Very Different Political Movements

Khadim Rizvi, leader of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan. (https://tinyurl.com/yd39vhtu; CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en) The past few years have seen the emergence of two major new political movements in Pakistan —each of which holds important implications for understanding the country’s current state of play. One is the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), a civil society group comprised mainly of ethnic Pashtuns —who live primarily in Pakistan’s tribal areas, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces, and parts of the port city of Karachi . The other is Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a religious political party. Each group is controversial in its own right but still draws power from a large and passionate support base. Indeed, while there are no reliable estimates of each group’s membership, both the PTM and TLP manage to attract thousands to their rallies. Yet, the views, experiences and likely trajectories of the two political movements could not be more different. The story of each group says a lot about where society and the state stand in Pakistan today. The PTM claims to want greater civil liberties for Pashtuns and seeks an end to extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic group. The group first gained prominence in January 2018 after a police officer from the city of Karachi murdered Naqeebullah Mehsud, a Pashtun from Pakistan’s tribal areas, resulting in 10 days of PTM-led sit-in protests in Islamabad. Since this incident, the Pakistani state’s response to the PTM has been harsh. Initially, the Pakistan government responded by arresting and placing travel restrictions on PTM leadership and supporters. On Dec. 1, 2018, PTM leaders and parliamentarians Ali Wazir and Mohsin Dawar were arrested by Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency while attempting to fly to Dubai. A few days later, on Dec. 5, 18 PTM members were arrested after attending a protest in Islamabad, Pakistan’s federal capital. And on Dec. 10, PTM leader Manzoor Pashteen made headlines when he was blocked from exiting the airport in the city of Quetta to meet with families of missing persons —a move the Balochistan provincial government justified with allegations of hate speech and incendiary statements made by Pashteen against Pakistan and its institutions . Run-ins between the PTM and Pakistani authorities grew increasingly violent in 2019. At an April press conference, the Pakistani military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor, delivered a sinister warning to the PTM, stating, “[W]e want to do everything for the people [of tribal areas], but those who are playing in the hands of people, their time is up. Their time is up.” A month later, PTM leaders Dawar and Wazir led a protest near a military checkpoint in North Waziristan. What followed remains unclear, but at least 13 PTM protesters were killed while the Pakistani army reported one fatality. The military claimed self-defense from PTM-initiated gunfire, while the PTM labeled the tragedy an unprovoked massacre. But the blows to the PTM didn’t end there. More recently, in May 2020, Ali Wazir’s brother Arif Wazir was gunned down in South Waziristan. And on Dec. 16, Ali Wazir was arrested in the city of Peshawar after being accused of “criminal conspiracy” and making “derogatory remarks against state institutions.” While the PTM garners sympathy in the West and among some Pakistanis, the movement has failed overall to gain mass support in Pakistan. On the contrary, it attracts strong public criticism. Some PTM detractors paint the group as foreign-sponsored ethnonationalists with separatist ambitions; others accuse it of being linked to terrorist organizations in the tribal areas; and still others — likely because of its harsh criticism of Pakistan’s military — denounce PTM members as traitors to the nation. The other group, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, dates back further than the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement. TLP is a political party that embraces the Barelvi school of Islam — a subsect of Sunni Islam practiced by the majority of Pakistani Muslims — and defends Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, which criminalize any act or statement that maligns Islam or the Prophet Muhammad but are often exploited by hardliners to target religious minorities or settle personal disputes. In 2018, on Lawfare, we explored the threat posed by TLP and assessed the Pakistan government’s strategy of prosecution to keep the party at bay. TLP rose to prominence through its strong support for (and lionization of) Mumtaz Qadri, who assassinated Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, in 2011. Qadri attributed the attack to Taseer’s strong public opposition to the country’s blasphemy laws, which punish by death any visible representation, imputation, innuendo or insinuation that “defiles” the Prophet Muhammad (Qadri was convicted for the assasination and later executed by the state in 2016). Per the blasphemy laws, Ahmadis — a religious minority in Pakistan that experiences rampant discrimination — are prohibited from referring to their houses of worship as mosques or assigning to other figures certain epithets reserved for the Prophet Muhammad. Like the PTM, TLP organizes mass protests and often gains the attention of Pakistani authorities, which can sometimes lead to violent clashes. In 2017, TLP’s predecessor, known as Tehreek-e-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLYR), brought the movement’s firebrand leader, Khadim Rizvi, into the national spotlight when his followers protested a change made to a religious oath that was part of the formal induction process for new Pakistani parliamentarians. This TLYR activism ultimately forced Pakistan’s law minister to resign. In 2018, TLP staged two weeks of protests over the acquittal of alleged blasphemer Asia Bibi and caused an estimated 226 million rupees ($1.6 million) in damage to public property. In these protests and others, TLP members called for blasphemers to be executed. Rizvi was arrested and charged with sedition as the government tried to legally crack down on TLP following the Bibi-related protest, but the leader was later released after Bibi was relocated to Canada. And most recently, TLP shut down Pakistan’s capital again in November 2020 to demand the expulsion of the French ambassador to Pakistan over anti-Islam cartoons that appeared in the French press. Similar to the PTM’s leaders, Rizvi—who died suddenly after the November protests this year—used language and themes that were deeply offensive to many Pakistanis. He sparked outrage when he criticized the mass turnout for the funeral of philanthropist Abdul Sattar Edhi—one of the most widely loved figures in Pakistani history—claiming his orphanages were responsible for “16,000 illegitimate children.” Rizvi also lambasted the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) , a mainstream Islamist political party that has long worked across the Pakistani political spectrum. In one sermon , he equated JI with the Ahmadi sect, a deeply persecuted religious minority in Pakistan that many Pakistanis view as apostates. And this controversial religious messaging didn’t end with Rizvi’s passing. After Rizvi’s death in November, prominent TLP figure Mufti Zahid Mahmood Madani referred to JI’s amir, Senator Siraj ul Haq, as “bad mazhab” or “poor mannered” (in this case implying he is misguided religiously) and implored party workers in a TLP WhatsApp group to reject his condolence message about Rizvi. Despite these contentions, TLP has not experienced nearly the amount of backlash that the PTM has suffered the last three years. Rizvi’s brief arrest and conviction in 2018 was an exception, not the norm, in terms of how the state has responded to TLP. The state does not try to stop TLP protests, and it often gives in to the group’s demands. Tellingly, Rizvi’s funeral was attended by thousands, held at a national monument in Lahore known as Minar-e-Pakistan, and both the Pakistani prime minister and military expressed their condolences. So what accounts for the difference in public reactions and state responses to the PTM and TLP —and why is that difference significant ? The main reason for this discrepancy is that TLP’s signature causes enjoy much more support countrywide than do the PTM’s. Support for the religious blasphemy laws, which are ingrained in Pakistan’s legal framework, has been a mainstream position among the Pakistani public for decades. Opposition to the laws exists but is limited at best. The country’s mainstream religious political parties — which represent both Deobandi and Barelvi Islam and include parties such as JI, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazlur Rehman (JUI-F) and Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan (JUP) — are united in their support for these laws even as they criticize religious extremism. In 1953, the Barelvi cleric and JUP leader Maulana Shah Ahmed Noorani participated in JI-led anti-Ahmadi protests and wa
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