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For half a week in January 2013, many eyes in South Asia, and in much of the
world, were focussed on a maverick Mullah in Pakistan by the name of Muhammad
Tahir-ul Qadri. Many saw him, and still do, as a harbinger of change. A
Pakistani combination of India’s Anna Hazare and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, he
appeared suddenly like a comet on that nation’s political horizon, summoning up
the largest crowd ever gathered in that challenged country’s capital, Islamabad,
and nearly toppled the government. Just as suddenly, he melted away as did those
myriads of followers who braved the rain and cold at his bidding. Pakistan’s
version of Xenophon’s ‘March of the Ten Thousand’ was over for now. But not
without having left an indelible imprint on its political fabric, demonstrating
that people’s power still mattered in a system that, through most of its
history, has been dominated by the proverbial uniformed ‘man on horseback’ or
the military. Qadri appeared for a time to render the streets of Islamabad
chaotic. But those gathered around him saw his actions as reflecting a cause:
not just for restoring honesty in governance but seeking to do that by using as
the tool the tolerant, syncretistic, and Sufistic face of Islam which represents
Pakistan’s values, urgings and ethos much more than that fierce, fundamentalist,
and Salafist version that has been relentlessly battering the Pakistani nation,
exhausting it, and sharpening the public’s yearning for a positive change.
The Cleric with a Cause
Who is this cleric, Qadri, and what is he about? At the age of 62, his role in
Pakistani civic life had not been significant until now. A scholar, he taught
constitutional law at the University of the Punjab, founded and chaired the
Minhaj ul Quran International, an organisation that boasts of having established
a number of academic institutions, and for a brief while served as a legislator.
Disillusioned generally with Pakistan, he went away to Canada, whose citizenship
too he holds, to a meteoric return to Pakistan’s political firmament in November
2012. Pakistan by then was reeling from enormous problems, of terrorism,
corruption, mis-governance, an economy on the verge of collapse, the judiciary
and the executive locked in a deadly duel and an army with a reputation for
intervention getting increasingly impatient. Pakistan’s great, and perhaps only
asset, was its strategic importance, but it was already drawing much too heavily
upon it. The popularity of President Asif Ali Zardari’s government of the
Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) was at its nadir, and the opposition, Nawaz
Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) was no exciting alternative. A rising
star was Imran Khan, the former cricketing hero, whose flamboyance was
attractive to the crowds, but deemed an insufficient credential to head
government. At such a moment, Qadri had chosen to return home, the right man, at
the right time, at the right place. He used his firebrand style to quickly take
his message to the people.
It was one that resonates with most Pakistanis today. He is a ‘good Muslim’, a
scholar, and one who over the past years had slowly built up a reputation of
tolerance, moderation and anti-fundamentalism, representing the syncretistic
Barelvi School rather than the more extremist Deobandis in terms of
sub-continental Islamic leanings. In 2006 he issued a 600-page fatwa against
terrorism, totally rejecting it under “any excuse or pretext”. He travelled to
India in 2012, and delivered a message of peace to admiring audiences, stating
that “terrorism has no place in Islam”. He urged that both India and Pakistan
reduce their defence expenditures and spend the savings for the benefit of the
poor. Then in December 2012 he returned to Pakistan after seven years in Canada,
and almost immediately began his campaign for a “democratic revolution”. In
mid-January 2013, he led cheering crowds in a ‘Long March to Islamabad’. In a
country where 70 percent of legislators pay no income-tax, he declared,
convincingly to the massed populace, that “our lawmakers are the lawbreakers”.
The centre of Islamabad became “Tahir Square’’ resembling Cairo’s “Tahrir
Square”. It seemed Pakistan’s Arab spring moment had arrived.
Demands and Response
Qadri placed a list of demands. The Government must resign immediately. It was
to be followed by a caretaker regime that would initiate a series of reforms to
cleanse the political system prior to elections (which implied a postponement of
the polls). It was to be set up in consultation with the judiciary and the
military. This was akin to the “Bangladesh model” followed in that country
between 2007 and 2009. It was suggested that Qadri, backed by the Judges and
Army, was attempting a “soft coup”. Many thought the Army was switching support
from Imran Khan to who now seemed to be a more plausible player (the Army of
course denied extending any such support to either). With or without Army’s
support, Qadri was now invincible. Interior Minister Rehman Malik mulled over
possible forced intervention to break-up the crowds, but Zardari, wisely, urged
calm and offered to negotiate.
The tough talks that followed yielded fruitful results. The government of
Zardari, which had dodged a bullet, heaved a sigh of relief. So did,
interestingly, Pakistan’s major opposition parties. Neither Nawaz Sharif nor
Imran Khan was prepared to countenance the possibility of any delay in
elections, which Qadri’s initial pre-agreement demands had implied. They both
were somewhat heady from the smell of possible electoral triumphs, though the
Qadri phenomenon now injects some seeds of doubt into this. In any case Qadri
has taken considerable wind out of the opposition’s sails.
The Islamabad Agreement
The agreement followed five hours of intense negotiations between Qadri and an
11-member government team. It was signed by Qadri and Prime Minister Raja Pervez
Ashraf among others. Significantly it recognised a key role for Qadri’s party,
Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT). This party and the government “in complete
consensus” would propose names of two “honest and impartial” persons for
appointment as Caretaker Prime Minister, with the Parliament being dissolved on
March 16, 2013 and polls taking place within 90 days. Changes in the Election
Commission would be discussed between the government and PAT on January 27,
2013. The proposed electoral reforms would take into account Qadri’s demands.
Cases registered during Qadri’s protest movement were to be withdrawn, and there
were to be no “acts of victimisation and vendetta”. Thereafter Qadri asked his
followers to go home, which they did.
On the face of it, for Qadri, it did not look like a great victory. The
government, for instance, had remained intact, and the elections agreed upon
were due to take place any way. But Qadri’s aim was perhaps not necessarily to
extract the maximal demands, which he used effectively as negotiating chips. He
had managed to catapult his own political party (even more than Nawaz Sharif’s
or Imran Khan’s ) as the principal interlocutor of the ruling PPP as far as the
caretaker government was concerned, including with regard to the appointment of
its prime minister. Far more importantly, his moderate Sufistic Islamic force
had recaptured the ground from the al-Qaeda type extremists. He still had to
confront allegations of military backing. Where else, it was asked, would he
have got the funds and such organisational wherewithal at such short notice.
Even if it were so, it was a positive achievement that a massive crisis was
averted (for by then the judiciary and executive were jousting fiercely) without
a shot being fired in anger! Also any need for a direct military intervention
was obviated, and a non-military option to cut the Gordian knot was found (the
appropriate time for an Army take-over would have been now, rather than after
the post-election assumption of office by a new government with a fresh
mandate).
Regional Ramifications
The events of January 2013 also had positive ramifications for the Muslims of
both India and Bangladesh, the other predominantly Islamic country in South
Asia, albeit with a penchant for moderation (Islamism has never been a
preponderant factor in Bangladeshi politics, where faith has drawn upon other
value-systems as reflected, for instance in the deep veneration for the Sufi
Saint Hazrat Shahjalal of Sylhet, much like Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer,
Shahbaz Kalander of Sind, and Hazrat Data Ganj Baksh of Lahore. Qadri seems to
be a hyphen that links them all). Qadri emphasised the power of the tolerant
face of his and their religion over and above any violent response to the
supposed ‘threats of Islam being in danger’ as advocated by many extremists. As
his movement was taking place, there had been shootings across the Line of
Control in Jammu and Kashmir between India and Pakistan. Politicians are apt to
use such occasions to whip up populist and jingoistic support, but Qadri was
remarkable in the calm he displayed. Also in Bangladesh, where a political
imbroglio is brewing, the Qadri phenomenon would be studied for lessons to be
drawn from it. What exactly, we are still unaware of. So, Pakistanis had braced
themselves for the few days of chaos in Islamabad in the hope that out of it
would emerge the dancing star! It may be a tad unclear as of now if that has
actually happened, but the messianic role of Qadri would render him a serious
candidate for Thomas Carlyle’s pantheon of ‘heroes’!
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