When Zahoor Ahmed woke up in the morning on Monday, September 18, to head towards his electronics shop on Hall Road, the first thing he did was check the morning newspaper for the final result of the NA-120 by-election the previous day. He was surprised by the performance of the candidate he voted for.
“I’m happy that Sheikh Yaqoob won almost 6,000 votes. If we can bag that many after four weeks (of campaigning) he can get 60,000 next year,” Ahmed reflected a couple of weeks after the by-poll.
Zahoor Ahmed, like many in the NA-120 constituency, had been a loyal voter of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). However, he like many of his friends from the locality who historically preferred PML-N over its traditional rival the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), are jumping ship after Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification.
“Nawaz Sharif and the Noon League used to support Islam and Pakistan,” says Kaleem Ullah, a resident from Prem Nagar. “Now they are just Modi’s friends, who are silent on the atrocities in Kashmir, and say nothing about (Raw agent Kulbhushan Jadhav).”
Zahoor Ahmed and Kaleem Ullah, along with 5,820 others, voted for Mohammed Yaqoob Sheikh, the independent candidate of the Milli Muslim League (MML), affiliated with the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in the NA-120 by-poll. 7,130 others voted for Tehreek Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLY), a group formed in support of Mumtaz Qadri, that evolved into a party after former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer’s murderer was hanged.
PPP’s NA-120 nominee Faisal Mir, who could only bag 1,414 votes, was shocked by the financial clout that the TLY and MML displayed. “They were spending money everywhere and buying votes,” he said.
Punjab law minister, and PML-L leader, Rana Sanaullah believes that these Islamist parties that won over 11pc of the vote in the NA-120 by-poll have been created by ‘invisible forces’ – a reference to the military establishment – to corner the PML-N in Punjab.
“The votes won by these parties is basically the difference in PML-N’s votes from 2013 to 2017,” he says. “They have been deliberately put forward to dent our vote bank.”
Another party insider confirms that senior army officials had shared the detailed plan to mainstream the radical elements, in order to curb their militancy, with the then prime minister Nawaz Sharif.
“That’s the reason Nawaz Sharif isn’t prime minister anymore,” the PML-N leader said, echoing the claims of Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif, who in his speech at the Asia Society in the US said that the ouster PM “had paid the price of trying to improve ties with India”.
PML-N spokesperson and Punjab MPA Zaeem Qadri says MML and TLY should never have been allowed to contest the election in the first place.
“These are not religious groups. They are banned militant organisations masquerading as political parties against us,” he says.
TLY President Ashraf Asif Jalali maintains that his group isn’t aligned against anyone and supports an ideological cause.
“We were promised Shariah and strict implementation of the blasphemy law during our protests against Mumtaz Qadri’s martyrdom,” he says.
MML spokesman Tabish Qayum also reiterates that his party’s struggle is to create the Pakistan that Muhammad Ali Jinnah had envisioned. “Look at what India is doing in Kashmir. We are trying to fight for a Pakistan that stands up for our Kashmiri brothers, which is why under the banner of the Mohsin-e-Kashmir (Hafiz Saeed) we are fighting for the implementation of Islam and the ideology of Pakistan.”
In press conference on Thursday, the Inter Services Public Relations Director General (DG) Maj Gen Asim Ghafoor confirmed that a ‘process’ is underway to find a ‘constructive’ role for the militants.
“It is in my knowledge that the government has started some discussion over it, that, how do we mainstream them, so that they could do constructive contribution,” the DG ISPR said, without hinting at any role that army might’ve played in the plan.
Political scientist Hasan Askari Rizvi, the author of Military, State and Society in Pakistan,believes the ruling party is crying wolf over the rise of Islamist parties saying there is no evidence that the PML-N government has done anything against the Islamist elements.
“However, there is a lot of evidence of them taking help from these groups in the past to maintain their own hegemony. Let’s not forget that the PML-N is a right-wing religiously oriented party itself,” Rizvi says.
But over the past couple of years the PML-N has been credited with taking many progressive steps including unblocking YouTube, passing a women’s rights bill that collectively irked Islamist groups, asking the Punjab police to remove anti-Ahmadiyya posters at Lahore’s Hafeez Centre and punishing a convicted terrorist Mumtaz Qadri.
However, former PML-N MNA and analyst Ayaz Amir doesn’t buy the claims of those that suggest that the ruling party has become more ‘liberal’, something that the Islamist groups have protested against in recent times.
“Look at these pseudo-liberals, first they claim to say there is a problem with militancy, and now that a constructive mainstreaming is being chalked out they seem to have a problem with that as well,” he says.
What, however, is undoubtedly evident is that a plan to mainstream radical groups is underway, and the PML-N feels threatened by it. Senior PML-N leaders, however, remain confident of overcoming what they called are ‘undemocratic roadblocks’.
The MML, which still hasn’t been registered by the Election Commission of Pakistan, has backed independent candidate Haji Liaqat Khan in the NA-4 by-election in Peshawar. But the MML is confident it would be a registered party by the time voting gets underway in NA-4 onOctober 26.
Does that set the tone for what’s in store for the next few months?
“That, the time to come will tell. The government will take a decision,” said the DG ISPR Maj Gen Asim Ghafoor.