Pakistan’s
anti-blasphemy movement is showing once again that real power lies in the
streets. By Omar Waraich
Asia Bibi’s life
is still in danger. Despite being acquitted on Oct. 31 by Pakistan’s Supreme
Court, which lifted her death sentence on blasphemy charges, the Christian
farmworker is unable to leave the country. After the verdict, violent mobs
unleashed anger, threats and destruction. They laid siege to major cities. They
blocked motorways. They torched cars, buses and buildings. They even threatened
the lives of the prime minister, the chief justice and the army chief. And yet,
instead of making clear that this violence won’t have a bearing on the Bibi
case, the authorities bowed to the
pressure.
On Wednesday
night, there were reports that she might have finally left the country. Senior
European Union officials and her lawyer, who has had to seek temporary asylum
in the Netherlands, said she was on a flight out of Pakistan. Later the
government announced that she had been moved from a jail where it couldn’t
guarantee her safety to a secure location in Islamabad. And the commotion
excited by her possible departure has only made the religious hard-liners more
determined, as they prepare to mount large demonstrations after Friday prayers
this week.
For
Khadim Hussain Rizvi, the leader of Tehreek-e-Labbaik (the
Movement of Devotion to the Prophet), nothing short of her execution will do.
The crisis has revealed, once again, a deepening fault line that runs through
the country: For religious hard-liners, the law only matters as long as it
conforms to their brand of Islam. When the two diverge, hard-liners such as
Rizvi can bring pressure to bear by casting themselves as Islam’s true
representatives.
There is nothing that stirs more outrage in Pakistan than
the charge of blasphemy. A mere accusation is enough to endanger someone’s
life; in Bibi’s case, for example, there is no evidence that she ever made
the statement of which she is accused. Judges are terrified of acquitting
anyone, lest they become the next target. Defense lawyers have
been killed in court. Witnesses and families have to go into hiding.
The authorities, instead of standing firm in defending human rights, meekly
give ground to those using violence to suppress those rights.
For Rizvi and his supporters, there is no higher calling
than to avenge an alleged insult to the prophet Muhammad. In a country where
all but three percent of the population is Muslim, he has managed to promote a
narrative that insists Islam is perpetually imperiled. He calls on his
followers to take matters into their own hands (which can include claiming the
lives of others). To maintain this violent hysteria, his supporters always
insist an offense was committed and that punishment must follow. They are never
relieved to learn that the allegation was false, that the evidence doesn’t
exist, and that the accused is innocent.
The
passivity of the Pakistani authorities stands in stark contrast with its
reaction to the rise of the nonviolent Pashtun Protection Movement, which has
been demanding an end to extrajudicial killings and forced
disappearances. The authorities have casually spurned the group’s demands,
suppressed media coverage of its efforts, banned its peaceful demonstrations
and detained its leaders. But when it came to Rizvi and his followers’ use of
violence, they can seemingly get a free pass.
The real threat to the country’s security was considered
to be the austere and literalist-minded Taliban, who had seized vast swaths of
territory, mounted devastating bombings in major cities and killed thousands of
Pakistani troops. Little did anyone suspect that Rizvi’s branch of the Barelvi
tradition, to which the majority of Pakistanis belong and which has long been
regarded as a quiet and mystical branch of the faith, would also turn on the
state, and in a more insidious manner. Rizvi’s followers are not limited to the
hills of the tribal areas but have the potential to sway people in the
country’s heartlands.
For Prime Minister Imran Khan, the crisis represents a
major challenge. Each time he has raised hopes with bold commitments, they have
been swiftly reversed — whether it was the
pledge to give Bengali and Afghan refugees citizenship, to appoint a member of the Ahmadi sect to
his economic advisory council, or to uphold the Supreme Court verdict and
confront Rizvi’s mobs when they threatened violence.
Last
year, Khan and his party were happy to support Rizvi’s violent rhetoric and
practices, accusing the previous government of being part of an “international
conspiracy” to weaken Islam, and successfully securing the
resignation of the then-law minister. In the last election, Rizvi formed a
party that gathered
more than 2 million votes in a suspiciously well-funded
campaign.
But it isn’t elected office that Rizvi covets. He has
realized that true power can be commanded on the streets. You don’t need the
highest number of votes; you just need the highest number of violent
supporters. It’s the consequence of a ruinous history of indulging or backing
armed groups for cynical, short-term gains. And it backfires every time.
It is not clear what will happen to Bibi. It is
forbidding to think of the ordeal that awaits her if she indeed has not left
the country, having already endured eight years on death row for a crime she
didn’t commit and that shouldn’t exist in the first place. What is clear,
however, is that the government — far from protecting the weak and marginalized
who need it the most and challenging the powerful forces of bigotry who can
defy it — has abandoned its own commitments to human rights.
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