MANY a reactionary outfit has been allowed to thrive on Pakistani soil. Each one of them has ill served the global image of this country. Indeed, their incendiary rhetoric and violent actions have reinforced the enemy’s narrative and weakened our principled positions on regional human rights issues. And in its efforts to ‘manage’ the violence these ultra right-wing outfits wreak, the government cedes more and more space to them — a vicious cycle that appears to have no end in sight.

The latest instance of this myopic approach was played out at the Faizabad interchange between Islamabad and Rawalpindi. The site was occupied by a large number of Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan activists protesting against the blasphemous caricatures by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Despite clashes with the police, they refused to end their sit-in until the government met their demands.

These included: boycotting French products, expelling the French ambassador, not appointing an ambassador to France and releasing all arrested TLP activists. On Monday night, the TLP announced that the government had agreed to its demands. While no official confirmation has yet been forthcoming, the interior ministry apparently ordered the immediate release of the detained activists. Once again it seems the ultra-right has browbeaten the Pakistani state into capitulation.

The sense of déjà-vu is unmistakable, and not only because such craven surrender has been par for the course for some time in this country. It was in November 2017 at the Faizabad interchange, during the PML-N government’s tenure, that the TLP first made its presence felt when its activists forcibly occupied the site for over 20 days to demand the ouster of the law minister on entirely specious grounds.

A police operation went awry, forcing the resignation of the minister and a humiliating climbdown by the government. The end came with a questionable army-brokered agreement — and cash being distributed among the protesters by a senior military official. In the elections that followed next year, the TLP — until recently a little-known outfit whose raison d’être had been the lionisation of former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer’s murderer — played spoiler and dented the PML-N vote bank in several constituencies. It has since demonstrated its destructive street power on several other occasions, most notably on the announcement of Asiya Bibi’s acquittal by the Supreme Court.

The group tasted blood when it first clashed with the authorities in 2017, and like other such entities, it will continue to use its bully pulpit to pressure governments into wholly untenable compromises that an economically weak country cannot afford. Blocking coverage of the protests on television or suspending mobile phone services, as the PTI government has done this time, are redundant and short-term tactics. Matters have come to a point where it is imperative to stop mollycoddling groups of TLP’s ilk, let alone using them for dubious political objectives. They can only lead Pakistan to ruin.

Published in Dawn, November 18th, 2020