Revisiting the hard approach
November 9, 2025
DAWN
The writer is a security analyst.
AFTER Zohran Mamdani’s victory as mayor of New York, academic Vali Nasr remarked on social media that the moment symbolised “the end of the era of the Global War on Terror”. Yet, for Pakistan, the supposed front-line state in that long global campaign, the war never truly ended but rather got worse. Ironically, nations once branded as epicentres of terrorism, Iraq, Syria, and even Afghanistan now appear relatively more stable. One must ask why Pakistan remains suspended in perpetual insecurity, despite once being the front-line state in the war against terrorism.
The state has found many excuses to explain terrorism within its borders, blaming Afghanistan, global jihadist networks, local militant groups and religious extremism. Yet it rarely reflects on the policies it crafted to remain relevant in the region’s strategic game. These policies were marred by miscalculations regarding the strengths and weaknesses of militant groups, and more critically, by persistent policy failures. Successive governments and security institutions have refused to admit these mistakes, hold anyone accountable, or meaningfully reform the frameworks that consistently failed to deliver.
The irony lies in the fact that Pakistan’s security apparatus continued to implement the very approaches that had proven ineffective. Instead of acknowledging their flaws, it became defensive and intolerant of criticism, silencing legitimate forums and institutions that could have questioned these policy failures and ensured even minimal transparency in decision-making.
Apparently, the state institutions have decided to address the problems of terrorism and extremism decisively. This renewed resolve is reflected both in Pakistan’s posture towards Afghanistan and in how the state has dealt with the extremist group TLP in Punjab. However, once again, these policies are being implemented with full impunity, and it remains unclear who’ll be held accountable if they fail to deliver the desired outcomes.
State institutions must not lose their composure in their display of muscle.
In recent times, civilian governments have borne the burden of the strategic blunders made by state institutions. But under the current hybrid system, there is little room left to shift the entire responsibility onto civilian shoulders. The civilian leadership today appears to be in complete synchronisation with the military establishment in its approach to security, the economy and politics.
The synchronisation has created relative political stability in the country, but it is unable to address the security challenges that Pakistan is facing. What happened in Doha and Istanbul during the dialogue between Afghanistan and Pakistan showed that Pakistan, which had facilitated the Doha dialogue between the Taliban and the US, was now itself in talks, enabled by Turkiye and Qatar, with the Taliban regime. And in these talks, the bone of contention remained the terrorist groups TTP and the Ittihadul Mujahideen led by Gul Bahadur, and terrorist activities inside Pakistan.
Both these terrorist groups were close aides of the Taliban in their fight against Nato forces, and clearly, Gul Bahadur had been Pakistan’s proxy to support the Taliban insurgency. The TTP, which was equally lethal in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was tolerated for several years in North Waziristan until Operation Zarb-i-Azb was launched. Once again, the group was engaged in talks.
It was a deliberate policy to bring the Taliban into power in the hope that they would strengthen the state’s strategic interests on the western borders. The price was so high that it bled Pakistan and caused disharmony inside it. The approach to supporting the Taliban had only one objective — to bring them to power; the state institutions did not have any plans once they came to power.
The Haqqanis, considered close to the state, have turned against Pakistan — something that should have been a strategic shock, but was absorbed silently. Neither the state institutions nor the intelligentsia in Pakistan questioned why the Haqqanis wanted to reverse Fata’s status and convert the area once again into tribal territory, where they could operate freely, sustain their political economy, and continue spreading radicalism in Pakistan. The TTP and Gul Bahadur are merely the Haqqanis’ stooges in this plan
The irony lies in Pakistani officials signalling the possibility of regime change in Afghanistan if the Taliban do not comply with their expectations, an approach that violates diplomatic norms. Yet analysts are raising a valid question: if the state were to attempt regime change in Afghanistan, who would be its closest ally? Who else, if not the Haqqanis?
This is not just a dichotomy in the state’s approach; it reflects a mindset rooted in the concept of a ‘hard state’, where the application of hard power often clouds the distinction between friends and foes. The state appears to be focused solely on achieving its set objectives, regardless of the long-term consequences.
One hopes that whatever policy the state has crafted to deal with terrorism and extremism, it will deliver tangible results and allow Pakistan to finally declare victory over this decades-old scourge. However, state institutions must not lose their composure in their display of muscle. A ‘hard state’ should not mean a loss of reason; it must evolve long-term policies to address its challenges.
Anatol Lieven’s central argument in Pakistan: A Hard Country is that Pakistan is not a ‘failed state’; rather it has a weak state apparatus that governs a socially resilient society. The idea derived from his analysis is that a muscular state could strengthen itself through firmness and control. However, as seasoned former diplomat Ashraf Jehangir Qazi recently reminded us, quoting Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, Pakistan today is “characterised by weak governance, a lack of effective law enforcement, and a general societal and political indiscipline” — a reflection of Pakistan’s current political condition. As he wrote in these pages: “Reliance on the use of force to resolve complex political challenges is not an indication of a strong or hard state.”
Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2025
The writer is a security analyst.
AFTER Zohran Mamdani’s victory as mayor of New York, academic Vali Nasr remarked on social media that the moment symbolised “the end of the era of the Global War on Terror”. Yet, for Pakistan, the supposed front-line state in that long global campaign, the war never truly ended but rather got worse. Ironically, nations once branded as epicentres of terrorism, Iraq, Syria, and even Afghanistan now appear relatively more stable. One must ask why Pakistan remains suspended in perpetual insecurity, despite once being the front-line state in the war against terrorism.
The state has found many excuses to explain terrorism within its borders, blaming Afghanistan, global jihadist networks, local militant groups and religious extremism. Yet it rarely reflects on the policies it crafted to remain relevant in the region’s strategic game. These policies were marred by miscalculations regarding the strengths and weaknesses of militant groups, and more critically, by persistent policy failures. Successive governments and security institutions have refused to admit these mistakes, hold anyone accountable, or meaningfully reform the frameworks that consistently failed to deliver.
The irony lies in the fact that Pakistan’s security apparatus continued to implement the very approaches that had proven ineffective. Instead of acknowledging their flaws, it became defensive and intolerant of criticism, silencing legitimate forums and institutions that could have questioned these policy failures and ensured even minimal transparency in decision-making.
Apparently, the state institutions have decided to address the problems of terrorism and extremism decisively. This renewed resolve is reflected both in Pakistan’s posture towards Afghanistan and in how the state has dealt with the extremist group TLP in Punjab. However, once again, these policies are being implemented with full impunity, and it remains unclear who’ll be held accountable if they fail to deliver the desired outcomes.
State institutions must not lose their composure in their display of muscle.
In recent times, civilian governments have borne the burden of the strategic blunders made by state institutions. But under the current hybrid system, there is little room left to shift the entire responsibility onto civilian shoulders. The civilian leadership today appears to be in complete synchronisation with the military establishment in its approach to security, the economy and politics.
The synchronisation has created relative political stability in the country, but it is unable to address the security challenges that Pakistan is facing. What happened in Doha and Istanbul during the dialogue between Afghanistan and Pakistan showed that Pakistan, which had facilitated the Doha dialogue between the Taliban and the US, was now itself in talks, enabled by Turkiye and Qatar, with the Taliban regime. And in these talks, the bone of contention remained the terrorist groups TTP and the Ittihadul Mujahideen led by Gul Bahadur, and terrorist activities inside Pakistan.
Both these terrorist groups were close aides of the Taliban in their fight against Nato forces, and clearly, Gul Bahadur had been Pakistan’s proxy to support the Taliban insurgency. The TTP, which was equally lethal in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was tolerated for several years in North Waziristan until Operation Zarb-i-Azb was launched. Once again, the group was engaged in talks.
It was a deliberate policy to bring the Taliban into power in the hope that they would strengthen the state’s strategic interests on the western borders. The price was so high that it bled Pakistan and caused disharmony inside it. The approach to supporting the Taliban had only one objective — to bring them to power; the state institutions did not have any plans once they came to power.
The Haqqanis, considered close to the state, have turned against Pakistan — something that should have been a strategic shock, but was absorbed silently. Neither the state institutions nor the intelligentsia in Pakistan questioned why the Haqqanis wanted to reverse Fata’s status and convert the area once again into tribal territory, where they could operate freely, sustain their political economy, and continue spreading radicalism in Pakistan. The TTP and Gul Bahadur are merely the Haqqanis’ stooges in this plan
The irony lies in Pakistani officials signalling the possibility of regime change in Afghanistan if the Taliban do not comply with their expectations, an approach that violates diplomatic norms. Yet analysts are raising a valid question: if the state were to attempt regime change in Afghanistan, who would be its closest ally? Who else, if not the Haqqanis?
This is not just a dichotomy in the state’s approach; it reflects a mindset rooted in the concept of a ‘hard state’, where the application of hard power often clouds the distinction between friends and foes. The state appears to be focused solely on achieving its set objectives, regardless of the long-term consequences.
One hopes that whatever policy the state has crafted to deal with terrorism and extremism, it will deliver tangible results and allow Pakistan to finally declare victory over this decades-old scourge. However, state institutions must not lose their composure in their display of muscle. A ‘hard state’ should not mean a loss of reason; it must evolve long-term policies to address its challenges.
Anatol Lieven’s central argument in Pakistan: A Hard Country is that Pakistan is not a ‘failed state’; rather it has a weak state apparatus that governs a socially resilient society. The idea derived from his analysis is that a muscular state could strengthen itself through firmness and control. However, as seasoned former diplomat Ashraf Jehangir Qazi recently reminded us, quoting Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, Pakistan today is “characterised by weak governance, a lack of effective law enforcement, and a general societal and political indiscipline” — a reflection of Pakistan’s current political condition. As he wrote in these pages: “Reliance on the use of force to resolve complex political challenges is not an indication of a strong or hard state.”
Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2025
CAN THE TLP BE BROUGHT UNDER CONTROL?
When the late Khadim Hussain Rizvi began appearing at public rallies across the country in 2012, seated in his wheelchair atop the back of a truck, few could have anticipated the storm that was about to follow.
The cleric from Punjab’s Attock district had once served quietly as a government-appointed prayer leader in Lahore. Yet, by 2015, he had emerged as the fiery voice behind rallies demanding the release of Mumtaz Qadri, the police guard who had murdered Punjab governor Salman Taseer in 2011 over his views on Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.
Rizvi was, by all appearances, an unlikely revolutionary. Paralysed after a 2006 road accident, he spoke with a mix of crude Punjabi humour, caustic wit and eloquent Urdu, often quoting Allama Iqbal to give profound gravity to his fiery sermons.
Initially attracting only a small following from the Barelvi school of thought, Rizvi’s fusion of intense religious fervour and populist anger quickly resonated across Pakistan’s disillusioned and devout segments. His thunderous speeches transformed him from a fringe preacher into the architect of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a group capable of mobilising massive rallies and paralysing entire cities.
Five years after Rizvi died in 2020, the TLP has not only survived but also thrived under his son, Saad Rizvi. The movement has cemented its status as one of Pakistan’s most volatile and potent political forces, blurring the boundaries between religious extremism, political populism and state authority.
This October, familiar scenes of unrest resurfaced following a protest call by the TLP. Major cities, including Lahore, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, came to a standstill as mobile services were suspended, schools closed and highways blocked with shipping containers. Clashes near Lahore turned deadly, reigniting memories of the group’s previous confrontations with the state. In response, the government once again imposed a ban on TLP under anti-terrorism laws.
Yet, as many analysts note, such prohibitions may restrict the group’s legal status but do little to diminish its ideological influence, particularly on the deeply sensitive issue of blasphemy in Pakistan.
To understand this enduring paradox, this piece traces the TLP’s trajectory: from its rise through blasphemy politics and the revival of Barelvi identity, and the state’s continuing struggle to contain the growing political power of faith on Pakistan’s streets.
THE BARELVI POLITICAL AWAKENING
For many, the TLP’s rise was not a disruption but a long-awaited moment of identity assertion. It is the awakening of Pakistan’s Barelvi community, a vast majority who have long felt both politically and religiously marginalised.
“The TLP is not just politics for us, it is the powerful reclamation of our Barelvi identity,” Aamir Mustafai, a teacher at a local madrassa [seminary] in Punjab’s Jhelum district, told me during the 2024 election campaign. “This is the continuation of a forgotten struggle, echoing the same battle for dignity and faith that Syed Ahmad Barelvi led against the Sikh Empire in Punjab generations ago.”
The Barelvi school of thought has historically had a strong influence among Pakistan’s rural populace, due to its deep association with Sufi orders and shrine networks. Politically, the Barelvi movement found its organised expression in the post-Independence era through the urban-based Jamiat-i-Ulema Pakistan (JUP).
Under the leadership of Allama Shah Ahmad Noorani, a Karachi cleric, the JUP rose to national prominence as he unified fragmented Barelvi clerics and revived the party in the late 1960s, leading it into the 1970 general elections. However, its political strength was centred in urban Sindh, especially Karachi and Hyderabad, where it won seven National Assembly seats, the peak of organised Barelvi representation. By the 1980s, however, the rise of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and deepening internal rifts pushed the JUP into political obscurity.
Analysts note that this decline was further compounded by Cold War-era geopolitics. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Deobandi institutions emerged as the principal intellectual and logistical backbone of the Afghan ‘jihad’, benefitting from state patronage, US support and Gulf funding.
“In the decades that followed,” says Israr Madani, an Islamabad-based researcher studying Islamist movements, “the influence of Deobandi scholars, madrassas, religious parties and militant groups expanded across the region, especially after the rise of the Taliban, which drew heavily on Deobandi ideology and networks. In contrast, the Barelvis increasingly felt invisible and irrelevant in the political and religious landscape, despite being a demographic majority.”
In this vacuum, new urban-based actors emerged. Saleem Qadri, a Karachi cleric, founded the Sunni Tehreek (ST) in 1990, to militantly protect Barelvi mosques from encroachment by Deobandi and Ahl-i-Hadith (Salafi) groups. Its slogan, “Jawaniyaan lutayein gey, masjidein bachayein gey [We will sacrifice our lives to protect our mosques]”, reflected its militant defensive posture.
But following Noorani’s death in 2003, the JUP weakened further, and the ST’s influence waned after its leadership was killed in a suicide bombing in Karachi in 2006.
Barelvi clerics, grounded in Sufi traditions of devotion and restraint, largely avoided the jihadist and sectarian conflicts of the era. This distance, as Mustafai noted, “made us invisible and irrelevant.” The community eventually sought a more assertive voice, one it ultimately found in the TLP’s aggressive political activism.
Now, the centre of power of Barelvi politics had moved from the urban centres of Karachi to the rural and small-town populace of Punjab. Furthermore, the nature of leadership shifted from Noorani’s intellectual-clerical approach to Rizvi’s populist mobilisation, focused intensely on the issue of blasphemy.
Supporters of Mumtaz Qadri during a protest in Karachi on December 14, 2015: the TLP emerged directly from the campaign to defend the convicted Qadri and his execution in 2016 became a formative moment in Pakistan’s modern religious politics | AFP
THE POLITICS OF BLASPHEMY
“Gustakh-i-Rasool ki ek hi saza, sar tan se juda [The only punishment for blasphemy is beheading]” has become the defining chant of TLP rallies, encapsulating both the group’s ideological core and the mechanism through which it mobilises large crowds.
The TLP emerged directly from the campaign to defend the convicted Qadri. Qadri’s execution in 2016, after the government’s resistance to immense pressure, became a formative moment in Pakistan’s modern religious politics. The vast, impassioned crowds at his funeral showed the dormant strength of Barelvi supporters across Punjab and Sindh, a constituency long considered apolitical or organisationally fragmented.
In the days following the funeral, senior Barelvi clerics convened in Islamabad to deliberate the future political direction of their community. Some advocated restraint, warning against politicising devotional sentiment. However, a majority endorsed Rizvi’s call to form a new movement capable of channelling Barelvi grievances into organised political influence. The result was the creation of the Tehreek Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah, later renamed as the TLP.
The group entered electoral politics in January 2017 at Karachi’s Nishtar Park and gained national attention that same year by contesting a Lahore by-election. This transition marked its evolution from a street protest movement into an organised political force, willing to confront the state through both ballots and large-scale blockades.
TLP’s rapid rise is rooted in its strategic — critics say weaponised — use of Pakistan’s stringent blasphemy laws. By portraying Qadri as a martyr and redefining religious devotion as political resistance, the party transformed traditional Barelvi piety into a defiant and uncompromising street movement, sharply diverging from the sect’s historically Sufi orientation.
The party first tested the state’s limits in 2017, when it staged a weeks-long sit-in near Islamabad over a minor amendment to the Khatm-i-Nabuwwat [Seal of the Prophets] oath in the Election Act. The protest brought Islamabad to a standstill and ended only after the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)-led government conceded to the group’s demands, including the resignation of the law minister.
A year later, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government faced similar pressure over the appointment of Princeton economist Atif R. Mian, an Ahmadi, forcing his removal. And when the Supreme Court in 2018 acquitted Asia Bibi, a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, TLP-led protests erupted across the nation, demanding the judges’ execution.
The party’s influence has since extended to foreign policy. In 2021, the TLP organised nationwide protests demanding the expulsion of the French ambassador over blasphemous caricatures published in France, underscoring its capacity to steer both domestic and diplomatic discourse.
CLASS, POPULISM AND STREET POWER
In Lahore, the TLP’s street-level appeal cannot be missed. Hundreds of rickshaws bearing portraits of Rizvi and the insignia of the Labbaik Rickshaw Union weave through the city, turning public transport into rolling political billboards. “We support the TLP because it’s a party led by people like us, not Sharifs, Bhuttos or Khans,” Jamil Butt, a rickshaw driver, told me a week before the 2024 elections.
Analysts argue that the TLP’s strength lies in its social composition, particularly in Punjab, where rapid urbanisation has transformed villages into sprawling peri-urban settlements. This shift has produced a frustrated, alienated lower-middle class that feels excluded from both elite politics and economic opportunity.
“Rickshaw drivers, shopkeepers, small traders and farmers saw in him [Khadim Hussain Rizvi] an authentic voice of their frustrations,” says Umair Rasheed, a US-based PhD scholar researching the TLP. “His aggressiveness, his language, the way he challenged the ruling elite, all of it allowed him to appear as ‘one of them’ — a man of the people rather than a distant politician.”
This dynamic, analysts note, is why even the PTI, despite its broad populist appeal, struggled to capture this segment of Punjab’s electorate. Some observers describe the TLP as “the PTI of the poor.”
Rasheed added that Rizvi also cleverly exploited class tensions within the Barelvi community. By empowering local mosque-level maulvis [clerics], he positioned himself against the established Barelvi clerical elite, including pirs [spiritual leaders] or sajjada nasheens [custodians of shrines], whom he frequently condemned in his sermons. This intra-sect critique further endeared him to lower-rank clerics and their followers, who long felt marginalised by hereditary religious hierarchies.
Adam Weinstein, an analyst at the Quincy Institute in Washington, DC, who witnessed the TLP’s violent 2017 protest observes, “Enforcing blasphemy is the rallying cry, but beneath it lies rage at a society that offers no way up, and enraged young men always turn on minorities and the state itself.” He argues that what appears to be a religious movement is, in many ways, “class-based fury wrapped in religious language.”
The TLP in Karachi, however, draws strength from an additional and influential source: the conservative Memon business community, giving it both financial muscle and urban legitimacy. Several prominent Memon traders have even contested elections on TLP tickets, fusing economic power with religious populism.
ELECTORAL PERFORMANCE AND POLITICAL DISRUPTION
The TLP built its electoral identity around slogans such as “Deen ko takht par lana hai [Bring religion to power]” and “Vote ki izzat Nizam-i-Mustafa mein hai [The sanctity of the vote lies in the Prophet’s system].” These messages positioned the party as a force seeking to fuse religious absolutism with state authority.
Unlike many traditional religious parties, the TLP showed an unusual ability to transform street agitation into electoral momentum, drawing in voters disillusioned with mainstream parties and eager for a political vehicle that promised dignity, certainty and confrontation.
Its urban expansion became most visible in Karachi. The 2022 by-election in Korangi, typically a battleground for MQM-Pakistan, demonstrated the TLP’s ability to unsettle entrenched political actors. Groups of TLP supporters appeared at MQM-P rallies, loudly chanting “Labbaik, Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah [O Prophet of God, We Are Ready]”, creating an atmosphere of fear among MQM workers wary of mob aggression. A widely circulated video from the campaign captured MQM-P leader Mustafa Kamal accusing the TLP of “using religion as a political weapon.” Clashes erupted between rival workers on the polling day.
During the campaign, several TLP supporters described their political migration from MQM after a paramilitary crackdown weakened it. Abid Qureshi, a TLP activist, says, “When MQM’s muhalla [neighbourhood] committees disappeared, the local mosque and milad committees became new centres of influence. That’s where TLP stepped in and filled the vacuum.”
Political analysts argue that the TLP’s rise reflects not only religious fervour but also patterns of political displacement in Pakistan’s two largest provinces. Yet the party’s sociology differs sharply between Punjab and urban Sindh. In Punjab, its growth largely came at the expense of the PML-N. A 2018 Gallup Pakistan survey found that 46 percent of TLP voters had backed the PML-N in 2013, indicating a significant transfer of conservative, lower-middle class support toward Rizvi’s movement.
The party’s electoral breakthrough came in the 2018 general elections, when it secured more than 2.2 million votes nationwide, around 4.2 percent of the total, becoming Pakistan’s fifth-largest party by vote count. Although the first-past-the-post system prevented it from winning National Assembly seats, the TLP gained a foothold in the Sindh Assembly, winning two general seats in Karachi, along with one reserved seat for women.
Its disruptive impact extended beyond Punjab. In Karachi’s Lyari, historically a PPP stronghold, the TLP outperformed PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, relegating him to third place and indirectly facilitating a PTI victory. This outcome symbolised how the TLP had begun altering urban political equations.
Despite widespread doubts over the credibility of the 2024 elections, analysts note that the TLP’s vote bank expanded further, reaching roughly 2.89 million, an increase of nearly 700,000 votes since 2018.
Members of TLP protest after authorities block a road with shipping containers in Lahore on October 10, 2025: the latest ban on TLP, recommended by the Punjab government amid fresh unrest, appears to signal a potentially tougher stance than seen previously | AFP
DEVASTATING SOCIAL TOLL
In August 2023, the Christian neighbourhood of Jaranwala in Punjab’s Faisalabad district descended into chaos after allegations of Quran desecration against two Christian brothers. Within hours, mobs armed with sticks and stones swept through the streets, burning churches, desecrating Bibles and ransacking Christian homes. Over 20 churches and nearly 100 houses were torched, forcing hundreds of families to flee.
Subsequent police investigations confirmed that the violence did not erupt spontaneously. Local clerics affiliated with the TLP had used mosque loudspeakers to summon crowds, urging them to “defend the sanctity of the Quran.” Punjab authorities later arrested over 100 people, several of them identified as TLP activists.
The Jaranwala tragedy was not an isolated episode — it revealed the deepening fractures in Pakistan’s social and moral order. Over the past decade, the TLP’s aggressive brand of religious populism has fundamentally reshaped the country’s political and social discourse, causing an explosion of blasphemy accusations, a surge in mob lynching and renewed fear among religious minorities, particularly Ahmadis and Christians, according to police officials and rights activists.
They say that mob violence triggered by mere rumours of blasphemy has become “common, deadly and difficult to contain.” A police officer pointed to a recent Lahore incident, in which a woman wearing a dress decorated with calligraphy was nearly lynched by a mob on the mistaken assumption that the dress was sporting Arabic verses from the Quran. According to him, TLP activists, often backed by sympathetic lawyers, regularly pressure local police to register blasphemy cases without evidence, deepening local law-and-order crises.
A Dawn report on October 18, 2025 cited police officials who linked TLP workers to at least 25 attacks on churches and other religious sites in Punjab during the past three years. These mobs often vandalised property, set buildings ablaze and left several people dead and dozens injured.
Muhammad Amir Rana, an Islamabad-based security analyst, highlights the grave threat posed by the TLP’s Fidayeen Jathay, organised squads whose members reportedly take death oaths and pledge to sacrifice their lives at Saad Rizvi’s command, mirroring the suicide tactics of groups like the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
“The TLP’s Fidayeen operate openly among the population,” Rana says, “unlike the TTP’s more concealed camps in Afghanistan. And because the TLP is rooted in Punjab, the country’s political heartland, the emotional charge surrounding its mobilisation may be even more volatile.”
The pattern is disturbingly consistent. Last year, a local PPP member of the National Assembly (MNA), together with TLP leaders in Sindh’s Mirpurkhas district, garlanded police officers to praise them for killing a blasphemy suspect in a staged encounter.
In 2018, PML-N leader and then Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal narrowly survived an assassination attempt by a TLP sympathiser. There have also been reports of teachers killed by students over alleged “disrespectful remarks”, as well as mobs torching police stations for protecting blasphemy suspects.
GLOBAL REACH
During the 2024 general election campaign, posters of TLP candidates across Punjab featured not only Qadri, the executed assassin, but also Tanveer Ahmed, a British-Pakistani taxi driver from Bradford serving a life sentence in Scotland for murdering an Ahmadi shopkeeper in Glasgow in 2016. Ahmed’s framed portrait, surrounded by slogans praising his “sacrifice” underscored the transnational echo of TLP’s message.
In 2017, an audio recording attributed to Ahmed, who was in jail in Britain, widely shared on TLP social media, urged listeners to attend a rally in Karachi that drew tens of thousands. On stage, the party’s leader, Khadim Rizvi, hailed Ahmed as a hero who had “surprised all of Europe.”
The global resonance of this militant trend is now a concern for Western governments. In 2020, a Pakistani man who stabbed two people outside the former Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine — which had published caricatures of the Prophet (PBUH) in 2006, 2011 and 2012 — told investigators he had been radicalised by watching Rizvi’s speeches online.
Last year, the British government’s Commission for Countering Extremism released a report warning about the emergence of a UK-based wing of the TLP, describing it as “an extremist Pakistan anti-blasphemy political party.” The commission’s findings were unequivocal: the ideological current that propelled TLP’s rise in Pakistan was being mirrored, in subtle but significant ways, among segments of the British Pakistani diaspora.
THE STATE’S DILEMMA
The Pakistani state’s relationship with the TLP has long been defined by a cycle of confrontation and accommodation, bans followed by negotiations, and crackdowns followed by concessions. This cycle reflects the state’s enduring struggle to balance public order with the fear of provoking a religious backlash. Every attempt to contain the group has been tempered by anxiety over the explosive power of blasphemy politics, which the TLP has mastered more effectively than any other contemporary movement.
Since the 2017 sit-in in Faizabad near Islamabad, and until last month, successive governments have oscillated between repression and reconciliation, consistently bowing to the group’s ability to paralyse major cities.
Some analysts argue that the TLP’s initial ascent was not entirely organic but may have been enabled by certain establishment factions that viewed it as a counterweight to the PML-N, whose leadership had, at the time, adopted a confrontational posture toward the military. Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz recently reiterated this claim while defending the provincial government’s renewed crackdown on the TLP.
However, many experts dispute the extent of such alleged state patronage, noting that, while some level of tacit support may have existed, the TLP swiftly developed an autonomous and potent street force. Its resonance within segments of the Barelvi community, particularly around issues of blasphemy and perceived socio-religious marginalisation, allowed the movement to evolve beyond any initial political engineering.
Repeated negotiations with the group, including the lifting of the previous ban in 2021, the release of detained leaders and the further tightening of blasphemy laws have sent a clear, detrimental message: mass religious mobilisation can successfully extract concessions from the state.
The latest ban, recommended by the Punjab government amid fresh unrest, appears to signal a potentially tougher stance, though the state’s sincerity remains debatable.
The October operation in Murdike, near Lahore, involving thousands of law enforcement personnel, had dispersed the TLP supporters planning to march towards Islamabad. Punjab police registered 75 cases, including terrorism and murder charges, against TLP leaders and workers. The undisclosed whereabouts of key figures, brothers Saad Rizvi and Anas Rizvi, have deepened speculation and internal anxiety.
Since then, most TLP candidates from Punjab who contested the 2024 elections have started distancing themselves from the party, stating that “violence and mob action cannot bring meaningful change by attacking the state.“
Before the ban, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi met senior Barelvi scholars in Karachi, including Mufti Muneebur Rehman, who had earlier mediated between the government and TLP, assuring them the crackdown targeted the TLP’s network, not the broader Barelvi community. The TLP claims over 300 of their mosques and seminaries have been sealed. Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz later confirmed their transfer to Mufti Muneebur Rehman.
However, analysts opine that the Punjab government’s attempt to counter the TLP through engagement with traditional, moderate Barelvi clerical elite, which Rizvi frequently targeted, may have a limited impact. As scholar Umair Rasheed remarks, the state is once again resorting to the flawed logic of “Good Barelvis, Bad Barelvis”, an echo of earlier strategies of distinguishing between “Good Taliban and Bad Taliban.”
FUTURE SCENARIO
The TLP’s future is acutely uncertain, hanging on the state’s political resolve, the judiciary’s response and the party’s enduring populist appeal. The current official strategy, an immediate ban followed by legal proceedings for dissolution, signals a more assertive posture.
As one Islamabad-based security official tells me, “The state has decided that it has had enough. Given rising regional tensions and the surge in terrorism across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, it cannot afford internal instability triggered by the TLP’s street agitations.”
Officials signal an intention to dissolve the TLP as a registered political party, though legally establishing its terrorist credentials remains challenging. Among more than 80 proscribed groups, the TLP stands out for its deep grassroots networks, rapid mobilisation capacity and emotive religious appeal, making it far harder to suppress through conventional law-enforcement measures.
The party’s trajectory will also depend on its leadership. The death of Khadim Hussain Rizvi was expected to fracture the party, but his son Saad Rizvi has maintained its coherence and its capacity to bring cities to a standstill.
If political stability is maintained and the TLP is unable to trigger new crises, its influence may gradually decline ahead of the next election cycle. Yet, the ideology it embodies, combining religious populism, vigilantism and emotionally charged rhetoric, has already permeated Pakistan’s socio-political mainstream.
According to Weinstein, “TLP is the classic Pakistani dilemma — an extremist movement born from within society, tolerated and, at times, weaponised, until it became a menace. But its followers are still your neighbours, and the blasphemy issue isn’t going anywhere.”
The writer is a journalist and researcher whose work has appeared in Dawn, The New York Times and other publications, and has worked for various policy institutes. He can be reached at zeea.rehman@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, EOS, November 9th, 2025
TLP’s story is not just about weaponisation of religion — it’s about class, power and a state caught between crackdown and appeasement.
LONG READ
November 9, 2025
EOS/DAWN
When the late Khadim Hussain Rizvi began appearing at public rallies across the country in 2012, seated in his wheelchair atop the back of a truck, few could have anticipated the storm that was about to follow.
The cleric from Punjab’s Attock district had once served quietly as a government-appointed prayer leader in Lahore. Yet, by 2015, he had emerged as the fiery voice behind rallies demanding the release of Mumtaz Qadri, the police guard who had murdered Punjab governor Salman Taseer in 2011 over his views on Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.
Rizvi was, by all appearances, an unlikely revolutionary. Paralysed after a 2006 road accident, he spoke with a mix of crude Punjabi humour, caustic wit and eloquent Urdu, often quoting Allama Iqbal to give profound gravity to his fiery sermons.
Initially attracting only a small following from the Barelvi school of thought, Rizvi’s fusion of intense religious fervour and populist anger quickly resonated across Pakistan’s disillusioned and devout segments. His thunderous speeches transformed him from a fringe preacher into the architect of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a group capable of mobilising massive rallies and paralysing entire cities.
Five years after Rizvi died in 2020, the TLP has not only survived but also thrived under his son, Saad Rizvi. The movement has cemented its status as one of Pakistan’s most volatile and potent political forces, blurring the boundaries between religious extremism, political populism and state authority.
The Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) is once again facing a ban after being accused of being involved in terrorism. Five years after the death of its founder Khadim Hussain Rizvi, his party remains one of the country’s most disruptive political forces. But the TLP’s story is not just about weaponisation of religion — it’s about class, power and a state caught between crackdown and appeasement
This October, familiar scenes of unrest resurfaced following a protest call by the TLP. Major cities, including Lahore, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, came to a standstill as mobile services were suspended, schools closed and highways blocked with shipping containers. Clashes near Lahore turned deadly, reigniting memories of the group’s previous confrontations with the state. In response, the government once again imposed a ban on TLP under anti-terrorism laws.
Yet, as many analysts note, such prohibitions may restrict the group’s legal status but do little to diminish its ideological influence, particularly on the deeply sensitive issue of blasphemy in Pakistan.
To understand this enduring paradox, this piece traces the TLP’s trajectory: from its rise through blasphemy politics and the revival of Barelvi identity, and the state’s continuing struggle to contain the growing political power of faith on Pakistan’s streets.
THE BARELVI POLITICAL AWAKENING
For many, the TLP’s rise was not a disruption but a long-awaited moment of identity assertion. It is the awakening of Pakistan’s Barelvi community, a vast majority who have long felt both politically and religiously marginalised.
“The TLP is not just politics for us, it is the powerful reclamation of our Barelvi identity,” Aamir Mustafai, a teacher at a local madrassa [seminary] in Punjab’s Jhelum district, told me during the 2024 election campaign. “This is the continuation of a forgotten struggle, echoing the same battle for dignity and faith that Syed Ahmad Barelvi led against the Sikh Empire in Punjab generations ago.”
The Barelvi school of thought has historically had a strong influence among Pakistan’s rural populace, due to its deep association with Sufi orders and shrine networks. Politically, the Barelvi movement found its organised expression in the post-Independence era through the urban-based Jamiat-i-Ulema Pakistan (JUP).
Under the leadership of Allama Shah Ahmad Noorani, a Karachi cleric, the JUP rose to national prominence as he unified fragmented Barelvi clerics and revived the party in the late 1960s, leading it into the 1970 general elections. However, its political strength was centred in urban Sindh, especially Karachi and Hyderabad, where it won seven National Assembly seats, the peak of organised Barelvi representation. By the 1980s, however, the rise of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and deepening internal rifts pushed the JUP into political obscurity.
Analysts note that this decline was further compounded by Cold War-era geopolitics. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Deobandi institutions emerged as the principal intellectual and logistical backbone of the Afghan ‘jihad’, benefitting from state patronage, US support and Gulf funding.
“In the decades that followed,” says Israr Madani, an Islamabad-based researcher studying Islamist movements, “the influence of Deobandi scholars, madrassas, religious parties and militant groups expanded across the region, especially after the rise of the Taliban, which drew heavily on Deobandi ideology and networks. In contrast, the Barelvis increasingly felt invisible and irrelevant in the political and religious landscape, despite being a demographic majority.”
In this vacuum, new urban-based actors emerged. Saleem Qadri, a Karachi cleric, founded the Sunni Tehreek (ST) in 1990, to militantly protect Barelvi mosques from encroachment by Deobandi and Ahl-i-Hadith (Salafi) groups. Its slogan, “Jawaniyaan lutayein gey, masjidein bachayein gey [We will sacrifice our lives to protect our mosques]”, reflected its militant defensive posture.
But following Noorani’s death in 2003, the JUP weakened further, and the ST’s influence waned after its leadership was killed in a suicide bombing in Karachi in 2006.
Barelvi clerics, grounded in Sufi traditions of devotion and restraint, largely avoided the jihadist and sectarian conflicts of the era. This distance, as Mustafai noted, “made us invisible and irrelevant.” The community eventually sought a more assertive voice, one it ultimately found in the TLP’s aggressive political activism.
Now, the centre of power of Barelvi politics had moved from the urban centres of Karachi to the rural and small-town populace of Punjab. Furthermore, the nature of leadership shifted from Noorani’s intellectual-clerical approach to Rizvi’s populist mobilisation, focused intensely on the issue of blasphemy.
THE POLITICS OF BLASPHEMY
“Gustakh-i-Rasool ki ek hi saza, sar tan se juda [The only punishment for blasphemy is beheading]” has become the defining chant of TLP rallies, encapsulating both the group’s ideological core and the mechanism through which it mobilises large crowds.
The TLP emerged directly from the campaign to defend the convicted Qadri. Qadri’s execution in 2016, after the government’s resistance to immense pressure, became a formative moment in Pakistan’s modern religious politics. The vast, impassioned crowds at his funeral showed the dormant strength of Barelvi supporters across Punjab and Sindh, a constituency long considered apolitical or organisationally fragmented.
In the days following the funeral, senior Barelvi clerics convened in Islamabad to deliberate the future political direction of their community. Some advocated restraint, warning against politicising devotional sentiment. However, a majority endorsed Rizvi’s call to form a new movement capable of channelling Barelvi grievances into organised political influence. The result was the creation of the Tehreek Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah, later renamed as the TLP.
The group entered electoral politics in January 2017 at Karachi’s Nishtar Park and gained national attention that same year by contesting a Lahore by-election. This transition marked its evolution from a street protest movement into an organised political force, willing to confront the state through both ballots and large-scale blockades.
TLP’s rapid rise is rooted in its strategic — critics say weaponised — use of Pakistan’s stringent blasphemy laws. By portraying Qadri as a martyr and redefining religious devotion as political resistance, the party transformed traditional Barelvi piety into a defiant and uncompromising street movement, sharply diverging from the sect’s historically Sufi orientation.
The party first tested the state’s limits in 2017, when it staged a weeks-long sit-in near Islamabad over a minor amendment to the Khatm-i-Nabuwwat [Seal of the Prophets] oath in the Election Act. The protest brought Islamabad to a standstill and ended only after the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N)-led government conceded to the group’s demands, including the resignation of the law minister.
A year later, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government faced similar pressure over the appointment of Princeton economist Atif R. Mian, an Ahmadi, forcing his removal. And when the Supreme Court in 2018 acquitted Asia Bibi, a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, TLP-led protests erupted across the nation, demanding the judges’ execution.
The party’s influence has since extended to foreign policy. In 2021, the TLP organised nationwide protests demanding the expulsion of the French ambassador over blasphemous caricatures published in France, underscoring its capacity to steer both domestic and diplomatic discourse.
CLASS, POPULISM AND STREET POWER
In Lahore, the TLP’s street-level appeal cannot be missed. Hundreds of rickshaws bearing portraits of Rizvi and the insignia of the Labbaik Rickshaw Union weave through the city, turning public transport into rolling political billboards. “We support the TLP because it’s a party led by people like us, not Sharifs, Bhuttos or Khans,” Jamil Butt, a rickshaw driver, told me a week before the 2024 elections.
Analysts argue that the TLP’s strength lies in its social composition, particularly in Punjab, where rapid urbanisation has transformed villages into sprawling peri-urban settlements. This shift has produced a frustrated, alienated lower-middle class that feels excluded from both elite politics and economic opportunity.
“Rickshaw drivers, shopkeepers, small traders and farmers saw in him [Khadim Hussain Rizvi] an authentic voice of their frustrations,” says Umair Rasheed, a US-based PhD scholar researching the TLP. “His aggressiveness, his language, the way he challenged the ruling elite, all of it allowed him to appear as ‘one of them’ — a man of the people rather than a distant politician.”
This dynamic, analysts note, is why even the PTI, despite its broad populist appeal, struggled to capture this segment of Punjab’s electorate. Some observers describe the TLP as “the PTI of the poor.”
Rasheed added that Rizvi also cleverly exploited class tensions within the Barelvi community. By empowering local mosque-level maulvis [clerics], he positioned himself against the established Barelvi clerical elite, including pirs [spiritual leaders] or sajjada nasheens [custodians of shrines], whom he frequently condemned in his sermons. This intra-sect critique further endeared him to lower-rank clerics and their followers, who long felt marginalised by hereditary religious hierarchies.
Adam Weinstein, an analyst at the Quincy Institute in Washington, DC, who witnessed the TLP’s violent 2017 protest observes, “Enforcing blasphemy is the rallying cry, but beneath it lies rage at a society that offers no way up, and enraged young men always turn on minorities and the state itself.” He argues that what appears to be a religious movement is, in many ways, “class-based fury wrapped in religious language.”
The TLP in Karachi, however, draws strength from an additional and influential source: the conservative Memon business community, giving it both financial muscle and urban legitimacy. Several prominent Memon traders have even contested elections on TLP tickets, fusing economic power with religious populism.
ELECTORAL PERFORMANCE AND POLITICAL DISRUPTION
The TLP built its electoral identity around slogans such as “Deen ko takht par lana hai [Bring religion to power]” and “Vote ki izzat Nizam-i-Mustafa mein hai [The sanctity of the vote lies in the Prophet’s system].” These messages positioned the party as a force seeking to fuse religious absolutism with state authority.
Unlike many traditional religious parties, the TLP showed an unusual ability to transform street agitation into electoral momentum, drawing in voters disillusioned with mainstream parties and eager for a political vehicle that promised dignity, certainty and confrontation.
Its urban expansion became most visible in Karachi. The 2022 by-election in Korangi, typically a battleground for MQM-Pakistan, demonstrated the TLP’s ability to unsettle entrenched political actors. Groups of TLP supporters appeared at MQM-P rallies, loudly chanting “Labbaik, Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah [O Prophet of God, We Are Ready]”, creating an atmosphere of fear among MQM workers wary of mob aggression. A widely circulated video from the campaign captured MQM-P leader Mustafa Kamal accusing the TLP of “using religion as a political weapon.” Clashes erupted between rival workers on the polling day.
During the campaign, several TLP supporters described their political migration from MQM after a paramilitary crackdown weakened it. Abid Qureshi, a TLP activist, says, “When MQM’s muhalla [neighbourhood] committees disappeared, the local mosque and milad committees became new centres of influence. That’s where TLP stepped in and filled the vacuum.”
Political analysts argue that the TLP’s rise reflects not only religious fervour but also patterns of political displacement in Pakistan’s two largest provinces. Yet the party’s sociology differs sharply between Punjab and urban Sindh. In Punjab, its growth largely came at the expense of the PML-N. A 2018 Gallup Pakistan survey found that 46 percent of TLP voters had backed the PML-N in 2013, indicating a significant transfer of conservative, lower-middle class support toward Rizvi’s movement.
The party’s electoral breakthrough came in the 2018 general elections, when it secured more than 2.2 million votes nationwide, around 4.2 percent of the total, becoming Pakistan’s fifth-largest party by vote count. Although the first-past-the-post system prevented it from winning National Assembly seats, the TLP gained a foothold in the Sindh Assembly, winning two general seats in Karachi, along with one reserved seat for women.
Its disruptive impact extended beyond Punjab. In Karachi’s Lyari, historically a PPP stronghold, the TLP outperformed PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, relegating him to third place and indirectly facilitating a PTI victory. This outcome symbolised how the TLP had begun altering urban political equations.
Despite widespread doubts over the credibility of the 2024 elections, analysts note that the TLP’s vote bank expanded further, reaching roughly 2.89 million, an increase of nearly 700,000 votes since 2018.
Members of TLP protest after authorities block a road with shipping containers in Lahore on October 10, 2025: the latest ban on TLP, recommended by the Punjab government amid fresh unrest, appears to signal a potentially tougher stance than seen previously | AFP
DEVASTATING SOCIAL TOLL
In August 2023, the Christian neighbourhood of Jaranwala in Punjab’s Faisalabad district descended into chaos after allegations of Quran desecration against two Christian brothers. Within hours, mobs armed with sticks and stones swept through the streets, burning churches, desecrating Bibles and ransacking Christian homes. Over 20 churches and nearly 100 houses were torched, forcing hundreds of families to flee.
Subsequent police investigations confirmed that the violence did not erupt spontaneously. Local clerics affiliated with the TLP had used mosque loudspeakers to summon crowds, urging them to “defend the sanctity of the Quran.” Punjab authorities later arrested over 100 people, several of them identified as TLP activists.
The Jaranwala tragedy was not an isolated episode — it revealed the deepening fractures in Pakistan’s social and moral order. Over the past decade, the TLP’s aggressive brand of religious populism has fundamentally reshaped the country’s political and social discourse, causing an explosion of blasphemy accusations, a surge in mob lynching and renewed fear among religious minorities, particularly Ahmadis and Christians, according to police officials and rights activists.
They say that mob violence triggered by mere rumours of blasphemy has become “common, deadly and difficult to contain.” A police officer pointed to a recent Lahore incident, in which a woman wearing a dress decorated with calligraphy was nearly lynched by a mob on the mistaken assumption that the dress was sporting Arabic verses from the Quran. According to him, TLP activists, often backed by sympathetic lawyers, regularly pressure local police to register blasphemy cases without evidence, deepening local law-and-order crises.
A Dawn report on October 18, 2025 cited police officials who linked TLP workers to at least 25 attacks on churches and other religious sites in Punjab during the past three years. These mobs often vandalised property, set buildings ablaze and left several people dead and dozens injured.
Muhammad Amir Rana, an Islamabad-based security analyst, highlights the grave threat posed by the TLP’s Fidayeen Jathay, organised squads whose members reportedly take death oaths and pledge to sacrifice their lives at Saad Rizvi’s command, mirroring the suicide tactics of groups like the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
“The TLP’s Fidayeen operate openly among the population,” Rana says, “unlike the TTP’s more concealed camps in Afghanistan. And because the TLP is rooted in Punjab, the country’s political heartland, the emotional charge surrounding its mobilisation may be even more volatile.”
The pattern is disturbingly consistent. Last year, a local PPP member of the National Assembly (MNA), together with TLP leaders in Sindh’s Mirpurkhas district, garlanded police officers to praise them for killing a blasphemy suspect in a staged encounter.
In 2018, PML-N leader and then Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal narrowly survived an assassination attempt by a TLP sympathiser. There have also been reports of teachers killed by students over alleged “disrespectful remarks”, as well as mobs torching police stations for protecting blasphemy suspects.
GLOBAL REACH
During the 2024 general election campaign, posters of TLP candidates across Punjab featured not only Qadri, the executed assassin, but also Tanveer Ahmed, a British-Pakistani taxi driver from Bradford serving a life sentence in Scotland for murdering an Ahmadi shopkeeper in Glasgow in 2016. Ahmed’s framed portrait, surrounded by slogans praising his “sacrifice” underscored the transnational echo of TLP’s message.
In 2017, an audio recording attributed to Ahmed, who was in jail in Britain, widely shared on TLP social media, urged listeners to attend a rally in Karachi that drew tens of thousands. On stage, the party’s leader, Khadim Rizvi, hailed Ahmed as a hero who had “surprised all of Europe.”
The global resonance of this militant trend is now a concern for Western governments. In 2020, a Pakistani man who stabbed two people outside the former Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine — which had published caricatures of the Prophet (PBUH) in 2006, 2011 and 2012 — told investigators he had been radicalised by watching Rizvi’s speeches online.
Last year, the British government’s Commission for Countering Extremism released a report warning about the emergence of a UK-based wing of the TLP, describing it as “an extremist Pakistan anti-blasphemy political party.” The commission’s findings were unequivocal: the ideological current that propelled TLP’s rise in Pakistan was being mirrored, in subtle but significant ways, among segments of the British Pakistani diaspora.
THE STATE’S DILEMMA
The Pakistani state’s relationship with the TLP has long been defined by a cycle of confrontation and accommodation, bans followed by negotiations, and crackdowns followed by concessions. This cycle reflects the state’s enduring struggle to balance public order with the fear of provoking a religious backlash. Every attempt to contain the group has been tempered by anxiety over the explosive power of blasphemy politics, which the TLP has mastered more effectively than any other contemporary movement.
Since the 2017 sit-in in Faizabad near Islamabad, and until last month, successive governments have oscillated between repression and reconciliation, consistently bowing to the group’s ability to paralyse major cities.
Some analysts argue that the TLP’s initial ascent was not entirely organic but may have been enabled by certain establishment factions that viewed it as a counterweight to the PML-N, whose leadership had, at the time, adopted a confrontational posture toward the military. Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz recently reiterated this claim while defending the provincial government’s renewed crackdown on the TLP.
However, many experts dispute the extent of such alleged state patronage, noting that, while some level of tacit support may have existed, the TLP swiftly developed an autonomous and potent street force. Its resonance within segments of the Barelvi community, particularly around issues of blasphemy and perceived socio-religious marginalisation, allowed the movement to evolve beyond any initial political engineering.
Repeated negotiations with the group, including the lifting of the previous ban in 2021, the release of detained leaders and the further tightening of blasphemy laws have sent a clear, detrimental message: mass religious mobilisation can successfully extract concessions from the state.
The latest ban, recommended by the Punjab government amid fresh unrest, appears to signal a potentially tougher stance, though the state’s sincerity remains debatable.
The October operation in Murdike, near Lahore, involving thousands of law enforcement personnel, had dispersed the TLP supporters planning to march towards Islamabad. Punjab police registered 75 cases, including terrorism and murder charges, against TLP leaders and workers. The undisclosed whereabouts of key figures, brothers Saad Rizvi and Anas Rizvi, have deepened speculation and internal anxiety.
Since then, most TLP candidates from Punjab who contested the 2024 elections have started distancing themselves from the party, stating that “violence and mob action cannot bring meaningful change by attacking the state.“
Before the ban, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi met senior Barelvi scholars in Karachi, including Mufti Muneebur Rehman, who had earlier mediated between the government and TLP, assuring them the crackdown targeted the TLP’s network, not the broader Barelvi community. The TLP claims over 300 of their mosques and seminaries have been sealed. Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz later confirmed their transfer to Mufti Muneebur Rehman.
However, analysts opine that the Punjab government’s attempt to counter the TLP through engagement with traditional, moderate Barelvi clerical elite, which Rizvi frequently targeted, may have a limited impact. As scholar Umair Rasheed remarks, the state is once again resorting to the flawed logic of “Good Barelvis, Bad Barelvis”, an echo of earlier strategies of distinguishing between “Good Taliban and Bad Taliban.”
FUTURE SCENARIO
The TLP’s future is acutely uncertain, hanging on the state’s political resolve, the judiciary’s response and the party’s enduring populist appeal. The current official strategy, an immediate ban followed by legal proceedings for dissolution, signals a more assertive posture.
As one Islamabad-based security official tells me, “The state has decided that it has had enough. Given rising regional tensions and the surge in terrorism across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, it cannot afford internal instability triggered by the TLP’s street agitations.”
Officials signal an intention to dissolve the TLP as a registered political party, though legally establishing its terrorist credentials remains challenging. Among more than 80 proscribed groups, the TLP stands out for its deep grassroots networks, rapid mobilisation capacity and emotive religious appeal, making it far harder to suppress through conventional law-enforcement measures.
The party’s trajectory will also depend on its leadership. The death of Khadim Hussain Rizvi was expected to fracture the party, but his son Saad Rizvi has maintained its coherence and its capacity to bring cities to a standstill.
If political stability is maintained and the TLP is unable to trigger new crises, its influence may gradually decline ahead of the next election cycle. Yet, the ideology it embodies, combining religious populism, vigilantism and emotionally charged rhetoric, has already permeated Pakistan’s socio-political mainstream.
According to Weinstein, “TLP is the classic Pakistani dilemma — an extremist movement born from within society, tolerated and, at times, weaponised, until it became a menace. But its followers are still your neighbours, and the blasphemy issue isn’t going anywhere.”
The writer is a journalist and researcher whose work has appeared in Dawn, The New York Times and other publications, and has worked for various policy institutes. He can be reached at zeea.rehman@gmail.com
Published in Dawn, EOS, November 9th, 2025
The writer is a journalist and researcher, who writes for The New York Times and Nikkei Asia, among other publications. He also assesses democratic and conflict development in Pakistan for various policy institutes. He tweets @zalmayzia
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