SADF COMMENT Pakistan: the rise of religious 11 December 2017 Issue n° 110 extremism ISSN 2406-5617
Claude Rakisits
Dr. Claude Rakisits is a Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He is also Director at PoliTact, a The recent and successful ‘sit-in’ by religious extremists in Washington-based advisory firm which focuses on South Asian and Islamabad and the release of the founder of the LeT will strengthen Middle Eastern issues. both the hand of Islamists as well as the advantaged position of the military vis-à-vis civilians. This is not good news for the future stability of Pakistan. It will also complicate its bilateral relationships with both the US and India.
Two critical events in late November — the end of a long ‘sit-in’ in Islamabad by some 2500 followers of an Islamist political party and the release of Hafiz Saeed, the founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), from house arrest — may well turn out to be the inflection point when Pakistan’s political trajectory takes a radical turn and religious extremism deepens. This would not be good for Pakistan’s future stability. Let us briefly examine these two events as well as their potential long-term significance for Pakistan’s domestic scene.
The Islamabad ‘sit-in’ On 27 November 2017 a three-week-long ‘sit-in’ by the Tehreek Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLY), a relatively new Islamist political party led by Maulana Khadim Hussain Rizvi, at a major Avenue des Arts 19 intersection in the capital eventually ended peacefully. Still, six 1210 Brussels protesters and a policeman were killed and 200 injured during a [email protected] www.sadf.eu clash a few days earlier as the police tried to disperse the protesters. But the final agreement came at a great political cost to the newly-installed Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi. The ‘sit-in’ was a protest for what appeared to be a softening of the government’s stance on the country’s blasphemy laws meant to appease religious minorities such as the Ahmadis. The protestors demanded the resignation of the law minister, Zahid Hamid. Under intense pressure to resolve this protest, which had spread to other cities, notably Lahore and Karachi, the government not only fired the law minister but also freed and dropped all charges against the protesters. This capitulation became inevitable when the army refused to use force to remove the protesters. As a matter of fact the final agreement was brokered by the army’s intelligence service (ISI) during talks which did not include civilian government officials. Needless to say, Rizvi and his thousands of followers were pleased and only had praise for the army and its head, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa.
Hafiz Saeed’s release Turning to the second event under discussion, a court in Lahore released Hafiz Muhammad Saeed on 24 November from a three-month house arrest on the grounds that the government had not provided sufficient evidence for extending his detention. The government had argued that Saeed remained a threat to public safety and that his release would attract financial sanctions against the country and lead to a halt in foreign funding due to Pakistan’s failure to move against terrorism financing. Saeed is the leader of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a proscribed charity organisation generally considered to constitute but a front for the LeT, a US- and UN-designated terrorist organisation.
India has accused Saeed of being the mastermind behind the Mumbai terror attack that killed 166 people in November 2008. Not surprisingly, the Indian government was “outraged” by the court’s decision. The Indian foreign ministry stated that Saeed’s release was an attempt by ‘the Pakistani system to mainstream proscribed terrorists’. Notwithstanding these Indian outcries, privately Delhi probably was not too surprised. Saeed had been arrested several times on criminal and terrorism charges since the 2008 Mumbai attack, but each time his house arrest had been lifted. The Indian government has repeatedly made clear that any improvement in the bilateral relationship would require Pakistan to hand Saeed over for trial in India.
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SADF Comment N.110