Pakistan’s hybrid theocracy

To say that recent developments are disturbing would be a vast understatment. The PML-N government should gather the torn shreds of its dignity and pack up shop. For the mullahs have won. The political set-up is still standing, it is true, but what does that matter when it caved in so unceremoniously; giving the latter everything they wanted?

Aside from presenting the Tehreek-e Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) with the Law minister’s head on a stick — the Centre has also agreed to release within 30 days the findings of the probe into the saga that started all this: namely the amendment to the Finality of Prophethood declaration for electoral candidates in the Elections Act 2017. It has also promised to release all protesters while guaranteeing the dropping of all charges. And as if that were not enough, it is also said to be investigating its own (belated) action against those who had held the federal capital hostage for some three weeks. All that is left is for the Centre to bend over. Again.

The right-wing religious zealotry that we see today has remained the bane of this country’s existence from day one. In recent decades, it got a boost when the previous government of Pakistan People’s Party backtracked on its pledge to reform the country’s man-made blasphemy laws. The fanaticism imploded when the then sitting Governor Punjab was gunned down by one of his own bodyguards.The extremists knew that they had won when the ruling party remained unable to take a clear stance on the issue. That was the day that the democratic dispensation should have admitted absolute failure in establishing its writ and retreated. Because to stay on means fighting to the bitter end. And that has never happened.

‘They’ told us, the media, civil society, ordinary citizens, that blasphemy was too sensitive an issue; that the masses would become inflamed. So, we listened, quietly and carefully. Yet they, and we, forgot that the poorest of the poor are Pakistan’s minorities, in every sense of the word. Yet we hung them out to dry. The only thing that mattered for us, for everyone, was that the government survived with the Army safely ensconced in its barracks.

Except that isn’t quite how things play out here in Pakistan. And all of us should have known better. And thus it was while we, all of us, were sleeping that the security establishment slowly began stretching its long, long arms. You see, Pakistan is no ordinary country. Every actor is concerned with its own survival and the latter had to prioritise saving its own skin from its one-time proxies. Thus began the so-called mainstreaming project.

This has accelerated massively in the election run-up. Both the TLP and the Milli Muslim League (MML) — the latter which has as its spiritual leader, the recently released Hafiz Saeed –stood in two by-elections. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that the Army didn’t come to the government’s rescue. Not when the cross-partisan political set-up had already legitimised the mullahs and therefore done the security establishment’s bidding.