On August 8 this year, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) announced the launch of a mainstream political party, the Milli Muslim League (MML). JuD was co-founded in 1985 by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed who was a teacher at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore

Formed at the height of the Zia regime’s so-called ‘Islamisation’ phase, the JuD was originally conceived as an evangelical outfit. Its aim was to propagate a particular strand of the faith in an environment in which various Muslim sects and sub-sects were looking to dominate the politico-religious space created by the policies of the Zia government.

Asif Bayat in his 2013 book Post-Islamism writes that Saeed as a young man was a member of Jamaat-i-Islami’s (JI) student-wing, the Islami-Jamiat-i-Talaba (IJT). Bayat also informs that after creating JuD, Saeed travelled to Saudi Arabia where he came into contact with Saudi groups engaged in the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan.

The launching of the Milli Muslim League harks back to previous attempts by the establishment to control Pakistan’s narrative

Stephen Tankel in his book Storming the World Stage notes that this is when JuD’s militant offshoot, the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) appeared.

In 2002 Saeed claimed that he had severed ties with LeT especially after the Gen Musharraf regime (1999-2008) banned a number of militant organisations, including LeT. But most analysts have suggested that the banned outfits continue to spring back under different names and are largely “tolerated” until banned again, only to spring back under yet another set of names.

Nevertheless, it is now obvious that unlike a majority of so-called ‘Islamist’ ideologues, Saeed’s ambitions have always been more political in nature. From 2005 onward he began to push hard to create constituencies for JuD through charity-based activities.

The JuD was robustly involved in aiding victims of the 2005 earthquake in the Northern Areas of Pakistan and then again during the record floods in 2011 in Sindh. The JuD worked the short-comings of the state and the government in this context to its advantage.

However, according to an August 13 article in Dawn by Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute of Peace Studies, JuD’s ideology has remained driven by a “narrow social view” and is based on the far-right viewpoint of one of its ideologues Ameer Hamza.

JuD has been on the UN’s watchlist for over 10 years. In January 2017, the government of Nawaz Sharif put Saeed under house arrest. As a result the MML appears to have finally launched JuD into the mainstream electoral politics of Pakistan.

Amir Rana suggests that MML’s appearance is also a way by some sections in the “establishment” to challenge the electoral prowess of mainstream political parties which have broken away from the orbit of so-called “establishmentarian” influences.

If so, then this will not be the first time such a thing has happened. In the 1980s, the Zia dictatorship revamped the once centrist Pakistan Muslim League (PML) as a political expression of his regime’s theocratic understanding of Pakistani nationalism. During the first post-Zia election in 1988, remnants of the Zia regime within state and political institutions helped form the Islami Jamhoori Ithehad (IJI) — an alliance of various right-wing outfits including the refurbished PML.

The IJI was said to have been created to challenge the electoral might of Benazir Bhutto’s left-liberal PPP and to apparently safeguard the theocratic version of ‘Pakistan ideology’ which was largely conceived and propagated during the Zia dictatorship.

The IJI failed to stall the PPP from winning the election and forming the first post-Zia government. Then in 1993, Nawaz Sharif — during his first stint as prime minister — broke away from the IJI and formed his own faction of the PML, the PML-N.

Scholar and author Muhammad Waseem in his book The 1993 Elections in Pakistan suggests that this was Sharif’s first move to break away from the orbit of “establishment-backed politics.” The move did not go down well with some who had facilitated the creation of the IJI.

Just before the 1993 election the JI threw up a surprise by creating the Pakistan Islamic Front (PIF). The JI till then had been an exclusivist Islamic outfit navigated by a ‘vanguard’ of religious scholars. Its foray into the realm of populist politics through PIF even shocked a section of JI’s own senior leadership.

The PIF was formed by the then JI chief, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, as a populist expression of the JI. Waseem in his book saw the emergence of PIF as a more singular version of the IJI, now out to usurp votes of the “renegade” PML-N. The PIF’s manifesto was a mixture of populist economic initiatives and the protection (of the 1980s’ version) of the ‘Pakistan Ideology.’

But despite a boisterous election campaign, PIF was routed, receiving just 3.2 percent of the total vote. Such experiments continued when the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) appeared during the 2002 election.

The MMA was an alliance of religious parties. Author Christopher Jefforlot in his book The Pakistan Paradox quotes chairman of Pakistan Human Rights Commission Afrasiab Khattak as saying that MMA’s victory in the former NWFP was enabled by the regime “so Musharraf could exhibit to the US the dangers Pakistan faced from extremist groups and [thus] justify his [Musharraf’s] presence as head of state.” The MMA disintegrated in 2007 and its weakened version was ousted during the 2008 election.

In its August 9 editorial, Dawn cautiously welcomed JuD’s plans to venture into electoral politics but advised that it should strongly repudiate any lingering connections that it might have had with militancy. The editorial was also correct in pointing out that there were many examples globally of militant outfits reforming by taking part in peaceful democratic processes.

The MML has every right to promote itself as (yet another) vanguard entity out to salvage the ‘Pakistan ideology.’ But one must be reminded that just as the Pakistan ideology’s ‘modernist’ phase collapsed after the 1971 East Pakistan debacle and was replaced by a more belligerent and myopic strand, this strand too has been eroding for the past decade or so. It has become obsolete in a world that has drastically changed compared to what it was in the 1980s.

Something new is needed. And I believe it is parties such as PML-N, PPP and PTI who are out looking for it. In fact, so is the senior-most leadership in the military — especially ever since 2014.

As long as the tussle between competing political and ideological units remains democratic and intellectual, a new consensus on a more updated and constructive strand of Pakistani nationhood will emerge.

This is bound to happen despite the fact that there will still be those who will try to stick to the now corrosive version. But as long as they remain within the parameters of democratic processes and norms, they too can become a party of the new synthesis, instead of being impediments.

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 20th, 2017