The Limits of Possibilities of Religious Politics: The Case of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik in Pakistani Punjab

Abstract

Historically, despite the tremendous influence exerted by Islam on public life, religious parties and organisations have historically failed to do well at the ballot box, receiving an average of only 6% of votes cast in elections since the 1980s. Focusing on the case of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a new Barelvi political party and social movement that has campaigned on the emotive issue of blasphemy since being formed in 2015, this article argues that the clientelistic, patronage-based nature of democratic politics in Punjab, coupled with factionalism and competition within the religious right, continues to play a role in limiting the electoral prospects of religious parties. Nonetheless, as was seen in the General Elections of 2018 in which the TLP outperformed expectations, there are particular circumstances in which the religious parties are able to make electoral breakthroughs. While the TLP was able to make effective use of populist rhetoric to garner some genuine support for itself, this article argues that the organisations sustained campaign of protests over the issue of blasphemy fed into broader efforts by the military establishment and opposition political parties to destabilise and weaken the government of the PML-N prior to the 2018 elections.

Agrarian change, populism, and a new farmers' movement in 21st century Pakistani Punjab

“…All Pakistani regimes (military, democratic, hybrid) are premised on the landed aristocracy, industrial capitalists, and merchant capitalists and are integrally dependent on imperialist and subimperialist powers (Azeem, 2020). All political parties act autocratically in power (Javid, 2020) and cynically mobilize religion for electoral ambitions (Javid, 2021). There are certainly contradictions and shifting alignments of fractions of capital and imperialism within this “historical bloc” (Gramsci, 1971) which manifest as contradictions between parties and especially in the dominant role of the military establishment, but the continued rule of this historical bloc has required a hegemonic incorporation of the “intermediate” classes, which include second‐tier capitalist farmers (Akhtar, 2018).…”