The Siege Within: Pakistan’s democracy hangs in limbo as Tahir-ul-Qadri takes the stage
There is never a dull moment in Pakistan, but the political temperature was unusually high this week; with January 15-17 being most eventful. Sitting inside a special bullet-proof container, a cleric dressed in long, flowing fashionable robes and even more fashionable headgear addressed thousands of people in the heart of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. The cleric, who gave the government “time till tonight” to quit and dissolve the national and provincial assemblies, could clearly not count properly for he kept referring to the crowd as a “million-man march”.
In any other country, if a dual-national cleric had turned up out of the blue, demanded the ouster of a democratically elected government mere months before forthcoming General Elections, given an ultimatum to elected parliamentarians, and led a ‘long march’ to the capital, he would have been dismissed as a delusional joker. In Pakistan, though, things are quite different. It is a country where anything is possible as long as you have the military establishment’s blessings. Tahir-ul-Qadri, a Pakistani-Canadian scholar, suddenly arrived in the country with a bang, spent billions of rupees on a media campaign, hogged the airwaves and declared himself “caretaker of the entire (Pakistani) nation”. A Barelvi cleric and founding leader of Minhaj-ul-Qur’an International, a social organisation with branches and centres in more than 90 countries around the globe, Qadri is known to be a close ally of military dictators in the past. He was a legal adviser on Islamic law for the Supreme Court and the Federal Shari’a Court of Pakistan and also worked as a specialist adviser on Islamic curriculum for the education ministry at various times between 1983 and 1987. Qadri’s rants against the political class do not come as a surprise. The underlying objective of his long march is to derail the democratic process and delay the General Elections.
The idea is to keep Pakistan’s two largest mainstream political parties, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), out of politics and put in place a technocratic set-up for at least two to three years. Some political analysts have been warning the government for quite some time now about the military establishment’s fixation with the ‘Bangladesh model’. If they are indeed successful in their plans, the biggest losers will be the people of Pakistan who won a hard-fought battle to bring back democracy after nine years of military rule.
