How Pakistani Army Brought TLP Into the Mainstream
The TLP is also the party which, among other extremist religious outfits, was manoeuvred into mainstream politics by the country’s army brass as one of its tools of political engineering. It was thought that carving out the far right fringe from the conservative voter base of the PML-N would damage it in the 2018 general election. And to an extent, the damage was inflicted, and indeed, three ticket-holders even won seats in the Sindh Assembly, and the party emerged as the fourth largest having obtained around 2.5 million votes from around the country. This was one face of the army’s brilliant plan to mainstream the extremists.
In the very first year of the Imran-Bajwa hybrid regime seizing power, the TLP raised its head in the Asia Bibi blasphemy case. The then TLP leader Khadim Rizvi was arrested together with its second tier leadership which had started a blasphemy campaign against the judges who acquitted Asia of blasphemy,…