Pakistan paralysed

The TLY was founded two years ago, in August 2015, by Khadim Hussain Rizvi. It whipped up a campaign against Hamid and, with about a few thousand followers coming out to take on the streets of Islamabad, Lahore, Rawalpindi and Karachi, it effectively brought life to a standstill in these cities. They also shut down all private TV channels, along with social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Then something strange happened. When the civil government of Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi asked the army to remove the protesters from the streets, the army said it could not turn against its own people who loved the army. To put it bluntly, the army blatantly refused to obey the government's orders.

Instead, the army proffered its help to the government to resolve the crisis. It was the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who came forward to 'negotiate' with the protesters and eventually brokered a deal between the TLY and the government. The Law Minister resigned and the movement was withdrawn. It was clear that the army was directly interfering in the state's politics through its proxy, the TLY. The TLY is a hard-line Islamist party, which opposes any change in the much-criticised blasphemy law of Pakistan. It demands that the Sharia law should become the law of Pakistan. It is a party of Sunni Muslims belonging to the Barelvi school of thought.

The Pakistani media has been unsparing in its criticism of TLY

and the controversial role the

army played in brokering peace with the government. Pakistani commentators have dubbed the TLY as 'zealots', 'bigots', 'fanatics' and 'hard-line Islamists'; its members have been called 'hot-blooded' and driven by 'dark passions'.

Even the judiciary is perturbed by the role the army has played as a mediator between the civil government and the TLY protesters. Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui of the Islamabad High Court demanded to know: "Who is the army to adopt a mediator's role? Where does the law assign this role to a major-general?" The angry judge pointed out that the COAS, instead of following the orders of the government, chose to become a 'mediator'. The document of the agreement with TLY, which was submitted before the court, bore the signatures of Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal, Interior Secretary Arshad Mirza, TLY supremo Khadim Hussain Rizvi and Major-General Faiz Hameed.

The role of the army has come under the scanner for several reasons. First, it is beyond the jurisdiction of the army to act as a mediator between political organisations and the civil government. Second, the subterranean connection between the TLY and the army has also come under the scanner. Is the TLY actually the political façade of the army?

Third, the excuse given by the army in not carrying out the orders of the government to remove protesters blocking the roads was pretentious, to say the least. The army said, it "cannot take action against its own people." But, the record of the Pakistani army is full of instances of turning against the people of Pakistan. In 1971, when the Bengali people of East Pakistan had voted overwhelmingly for the Awami League and its leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, it was the Pakistani army which turned against its own people and killed tens of thousands of Bengalis when they rose in revolt against the conspiracy to prevent Mujibur Rahman and his party from coming to power.

Again, it was the army which 'acted against its own people' in Baluchistan, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and more recently (in early 2016) in the Okara district. A militant, but peaceful, movement was launched by the peasants of Okara in the Sahiwal division of Punjab, to get back the 14,000 acres of farmland under the occupation of the Military Farms Administration. The army suppressed the movement with a heavy hand. Most of the peasant leaders were arrested under anti-terrorism laws; scores were thrown behind the bars while dozens went 'missing'. The civil authorities in Punjab, working in tandem with the army, declared the agitators as 'terrorists'. With such a record, the excuse that the army could not act against 'its own people' is hypocritical and ludicrous. No one was deceived by it.

The larger and more disturbing question is whether the Pakistan army is trying to create a political proxy for itself, which will eventually supplant the democratically elected government to become the civilian façade of army rule. The recent developments in Pakistan have to be viewed in this larger context.

(The views expressed are strictly personal.)