Do the religious parties have any political future in Pakistan?
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If we go by measures of street agitation, issuance of regular threats of violence, demagoguery, and numbers of marches and rallies, there is no match for the power of Pakistan’s religious political parties. But the problem is they don’t have enough popular support to get a critical mass elected in the assemblies, let alone displacing mainstream, national and ethnic political groups.
It is quite the opposite: their more frequent shows of force and public displays of flag-bearing workers-- a majority of who happen to be young students of seminaries-- the general public appears to be scared of their brand of politics.
Consequently, their support base has kept thinning out, reduced to a ghost of a skeleton. Their best showing was in the first general elections of 1970; together the major religious parties—the Jamaat-i-Islamic (Islamic party), Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam (union of the Islamic scholars), Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Pakistan (union of religious scholars of Pakistan), polled 13.9 percent of the popular vote.
In the last elections, 2018, it has come down to 9.58 percent. Their share of the popular vote went up to 11 percent when they closed their ranks and formed a unified electoral alliance under the banner of Mutahida Majlis-i-Amal (United Action Front) in the 2002 elections.
There were two other factors that steamed the electoral engines of the religious parties. First, the anti-American position in the wake of the American-led intervention in Afghanistan that produced considerable support in the Pashtun majority districts adjoining Afghanistan.
Second, it was the alleged patronage of the military regime then that wanted the role of the major parties to diminish, and with the risk of religious extremism, were able to garner support from the West. That turned around the fortunes of religious parties in Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa where they formed provincial governments.
In recent decades, the emergence of radical, violent groups like Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and their war against state and society have further tarnished the image of the religious groups and parties.
Rasul Bakhsh Rais
It was quite puzzling for the scholars of political Islam to see such a wide gap between historically deep Islamic political activism and the poor electoral performance of the religious groups.
In the first place, the religious parties were never popular with the people as a political alternative to conventional political parties. For the first quarter of a century, after the independence, most of these parties confined themselves to preaching Islam, establishing religious institutions and thought of Islamizing society at the grass-roots level as the central elements of their ideal.It was during the Ayub Khan era (1958-1969) that they embraced political ambitions. The founding father and thinker behind the Jamaat-i-Islami, Abul Aala Maududi propounded theses of “Islamic state”, “Islamic ideology” and an “Islamic political system” quite similar to the political themes of the Ikhwan ul Muslimeen (Muslin Brotherhood) of Egypt.
Actually, Maududi with clarity of his thought, articulation and prolific writings has left a great mark on the Islamic movements beyond Pakistan.
Why then, have the religious parties failed to stir up a revolution or carved out a popular support base similar in strength to that of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt?
There are many reasons for the weakness of Islamic movements in Pakistan but I will confine to a few fundamental ones.
First, the social structures of Pakistani society being elitist and rooted in land-ownership and tribalism leave hardly any space for non-elite factions in electoral politics. They have held the grass-root, and with power politics and patronage they have further strengthened it over the years.
Second, the idea of an “Islamic state” in an overwhelmingly Muslim majority state where religious practices have taken the form of a culture seems pedantic. Ordinary folks don’t appear to be impressed with the ‘saving Islam in danger’ rhetoric when they have see so many religious institutions around and freely practice their faith. And the credentials and the posturing of the ‘saviors’ in this respect appears to be problematic when we see many of the radical and extremist religious movements and groups springing out of their networks.
Finally, the character of the religious partiers as essentially sectarian has proven to be divisive more than creating any Islamic solidarity. Every religious sect has a specific communal identity, symbols and political organization, often each divided further along factional lines.
That is hardly convincing for any altruistic religious manifesto or quest for creating an Islamic state. Yet, there is another troubling legacy: deadly sectarian violence that keeps visiting vulnerable individuals and social groups, ringing the alarm bell louder among the voting population about the rising power of such groups.
In recent decades, the emergence of radical, violent groups like Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and their war against state and society has further tarnished the image of the religious groups and parties. Ordinary people and their opponents haven’t bought the logic that the religious political parties are different, as they have taken a constitutional path to power. Their tagging with militancy in popular imagination remains strong.
Fragmented as they are and with the extremist brands increasingly defining religious politics, the prospects for religious parties in Pakistan are dimmer today than ever before.
– Rasul Bakhsh Rais is a Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Twitter: @RasulRais
