by NADEEM F. PARACH
The common narrative doing the rounds regarding the rise of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) is that the radical Barelvi party was the creation of the military establishment that used it as a tool to undermine the government of PML-N (2013-2018). Even though various rallies by the TLP could not dislodge the government, it did manage to usurp enough PML-N votes to strengthen the electoral prospects of the centre-right PTI.
There is nothing wrong with this narrative. Most political analysts are convinced that the TLP was treated as a clandestine political ally by the military establishment that was at loggerheads with the PML-N regime and wanted to pave the way for the PTI.
But this does not mean that the TLP was a cosmetic construct. It had emerged in 2015 as a movement led by the late charismatic Barelvi cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi, who was of the view that the PML-N government was trying to undermine the country’s controversial blasphemy laws. Ironically, even though the TLP sees itself as a frontline guardian of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, Barelvi clerics were not as active in authoring them as were the Deobandi ulema and political-Islamist groups such as the Jamaat-i-Islami.
Traditionally, Deobandi outfits have been theological opponents of the Barelvi, yet both are Sunni sub-sects. The Barelvi religious leadership found itself isolated in the 1980s, when the Pakistani state was aggressively recruiting radical Deobandi clerics from the fringes to beef up the so-called ‘jihad’ against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
But why were the Barelvi theologians absent from the equation? Firstly, the Barelvi do not have the kind of jihadist tradition that the Deobandi have. Secondly, Deobandi clerics were close to Saudi Arabia that was one of the major financiers of jihadist groups fighting against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. In fact, the wealthy Saudi monarchy which, at the time, was exporting so-called ‘Wahabism’ in the Muslim world, did not approve the manner in which the Barelvi often expressed their faith. Thirdly, one of the largest political vessels of the religious Barelvi, the Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan (JUP), had begun to disintegrate into various factions from the mid-1980s.
One must also mention that when radical outfits were manipulated in the country by non-Islamist politicians to undermine a political foe the first time, the Barelvi were largely missing from that equation as well. According to the historian Ali Usman Qasmi (in his book Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan), this was when the former CM of Punjab, Mumtaz Daultana, tacitly aided an anti-Ahmadi movement in 1953 to undermine the government of PM Khawaja Nazimuddin. That movement was led by radical Deobandi groups and political-Islamists.
Decades later, because of the manner in which the militant Deobandi were supported by the Zia-ul-Haq dictatorship in the 1980s, the scattered Barelvi religious leadership decided to regroup. In 1990, a group of radical Barelvi clerics formed the Sunni Tehreek (ST). According to Mujeeb Ahmad in the 2016 anthology State and Nation-Building in Pakistan, ST’s primary goal was to reclaim the ‘Barelvi mosques’ that it alleged had been forcibly taken over by radical Deobandi outfits. Thus began a cycle of violence between the two Sunni sub-sectarian clusters.
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