March against imran

March against imran

Pakistani PM gets a taste of his own religious extremism medicine.

The Imran Khan government in Pakistan is now at the receiving end of a long march – also called azadi march – courtesy Maulana Fazlur Rehman and his faction of the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islami, an Islamist political party with its base in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The march began in Karachi, passed through Sindh and Punjab, and has now reached Islamabad. Rehman rejects Imran’s prime ministership and demands his resignation. He has even criticised the Pakistani army of selecting the Pakistani premier. It’s ironical that Imran is now the target of the same tactics he once deployed against the Nawaz Sharif government in 2014. Back then it was Imran and his supporters who had openly asked the Pakistani military to unseat Sharif.

Thus, mass mobilisation of religiously oriented protesters against the incumbent government has become a recurring feature in Pakistani politics. This indicates a further Islamisation of Pakistani polity and society on the one hand, and continuing erosion of Pakistani democratic institutions on the other. Exemplifying this is the fact that Rehman’s march entirely comprises male students and clerics from madrasas – women have been disallowed.

This isn’t surprising given that Pakistan’s leaders have been riding the tiger of religious extremism for many decades. At one time, it looked like a useful tool to wrest Kashmir from India. But the monster has turned on its creator today and Pakistan is itself wracked by terrorism as well as religious radicals challenging the authority of government. Imran has asserted that the days of using Islam to grab power in Pakistan are over. But the reality is that he can’t support Islamist radicals in Kashmir and then oppose them at home – it’s not a tap to be turned on and off at will. It’s time to cut the water supply entirely.