Can Siraj transform the right wing?

Has any Jamaat-e-Islami leader, in recent memory, had the kind of sustained run of exceptional performance that Sirajul Haq is enjoying these days? One would have to go back at least two decades, to the early 1990s, when Qazi Hussain Ahmed seemed to be popularising the Jamaat through a series of innovations, to find a parallel. Unfortunately, we all know how some of those innovations turned out.
The Shabab-e-Milli spin-off from the student wing of the Jamaat, the Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba, certainly did help broaden the net of the party’s reach, but both the Shabab and the IJT came to be places where dubious and dangerous people were able to take advantage of the comfortable confines of the Jamaat’s overarching goodwill and credibility, especially in Pakistan’s key urban areas.
Throughout the Musharraf era, the toxic influence of the attempts to be more populist deepened. Many in the Jamaat look back at its alliance with both strains of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam, the JUI-F and the JUI-S, as dark times for the party. Its reputation as a party free of corrupt characters took a real hit as it co-governed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (then known as NWFP). Worse, the constant links between the Jamaat and organised terror, especially of the Al-Qaeda variety, kept cropping up. Many such links are now a matter of the established record of fact. This has had a debilitating effect on the ability of the Jamaat to reach further than its committed but small, established party base.
The fragmentation of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, the grand alliance of seven Islamist parties with whom the Jamaat had partnered for the 2002 elections, basically destroyed any chance at governing that the Jamaat may have had after the 2008 elections. The Jamaat was an enabler of the LFO and many consider it to have been party to the kind of compromises that are best represented by the PML-Q brand of politics. At the culmination of this era, the passing of the torch from Qazi Sahib to Munawwar Hasan was supposed to be akin to hitting the refresh button. Instead, the Jamaat’s problems deepened.
The Jamaat’s long descent, from being a party of intellectually rigorous and morally upright people to a party of angry old men (and women), reached a crescendo over the last few years under Munawwar Hasan. Perhaps the lowest point in the Jamaat’s history was Hasan’s shocking equivocation on the issue of the martyrdom of Pakistani soldiers being killed by terrorists. It is no accident that in March this year for the first time in its history, the party voted out a sitting ‘ameer’ and brought in a new leader.
One immediate marker of Sirajul Haq’s seriousness of purpose was his decision, upon being elected ameer, to give up his seat as minister of finance in the coalition government he was jointly leading with KP Chief Minister Pervez Khattak of the PTI. His role as an arbiter of reasonable compromise between the hard line adopted by Imran Khan and the rigid stance of the ruling party has won Siraj widespread, mainstream accolades.
The real impact Sirajul Haq can have, however, extends far beyond the immediate, and far into the heart of what Pakistani society has become. For the optimist, an example of the kind of Islamist leadership that Siraj might represent is his reaction to the brutal lynching of a Christian couple and their unborn child in Kasur. He strongly condemned the incident, and in a series of tweets, argued cogently for rule of law, and against vigilantism.
In any ordinary country, celebrating a leader’s endorsement of rule of law and basic human decency would be seen as odd. Have we really fallen so low as to require reminders of basic human decency and rule of law? Well, we are no ordinary country. And we do require these reminders. Over and over again. It is an unexpected and refreshing change that after the Kasur barbarity, such reminders have come from the head of the Jamaat-e-Islami.
Some leaders, like Imran Khan, like to careen in the direction their followers want to take them – their followers are leading them. ‘Oye’, ‘oye’, ‘oye’ is not how Kaptaan was raised. Yet he speaks in a manner designed carefully, by him, to appeal to the angry young man on the urban street in Pakistan.
There is a different model of leadership that exists in the world. One in which leaders actually lead. Leaders pull away from the lowest common denominator, and establish better norms, for their party, for their people, for their nations. Could Siraj be such a leader? The initial evidence looks very good. How will we really know? There are three measures.
The first is how good Siraj’s political instincts really are, in the medium term. Allying with the PTI in KP is good business for the Jamaat today. But on the aggregate, the PTI needs JI more than the JI needs the PTI. Simply put, the PTI cannot flank the Jamaat on the right. The PTI can only offer the right-wing voter a more viable, less radical alternative to the Munawwar-era JI. If the Siraj-era Jamaat itself became that option, the PTI is a net loser.
Sirajul Haq’s challenge will be to sustain the coalition in KP, whilst aggressively courting the right-wing vote that his party has bled to the PML-N on the one hand, and the PTI on the other. Moreover, Siraj needs to sustain his KP coalition without ruining his relationship with Maulana Fazlur Rehman and the JUI-F. This will be a potentially tall order, given the deep acrimony between Kaptaan and Maulana Sahib. The JI can flank any party on the right wing, except the JUI-F. That means leverage for the Maulana, and kid gloves for Siraj Sahib.
The second measure of the quality of Siraj’s leadership will be on re-shaping the religious discourse in Pakistan. If the JI’s convening capacity can be used to re-engage sanity at the pesh imam and khateeb level across the country, the JI would become a transformative body. The problem is that to do so requires challenging the local political economies that have emerged from the headless hydra of radicalisation that the Jamaat itself was once (and may still want to be) a part of whipping up.
Finally, the third measure of Siraj’s leadership will be how he positions the Jamaat on foreign policy issues. The JI will continue to be deeply anti-American; of that there can be little doubt. But the more interesting test will be its position on India and Kashmir. Siraj’s mentor, the late Qazi Hussain Ahmad was instrumental in the weaponisation of the Kashmiri struggle. Back then, Hafiz Saeed was a small fish in Qazi Sahib’s big pond. Today, Hafiz Saeed is, unfortunately, a central figure in South Asian regional dynamics.
Whatever else this may say about Pakistan’s poor choices over the least three decades, it also says something about the run of play on the Pakistani right wing. Has the Jamaat become a second-fiddle actor to players like the Jamaat ud Dawa? Will the Jamaat follow the JuD on relations with India, or will it attempt to chart out its own, moderate, but strongly pro-Kashmir position?
It has been more than three decades since Pakistan has had electable, credible, moderate and rational leadership on the right wing. The early signs are that Sirajul Haq may represent a quantum shift in Pakistan’s mainstream, democratic Islamist leadership. To fulfil his potential, he will need to be a transformative figure, to go further and to achieve more, than any of his predecessors, save Maulana Maudoodi. It is a tall order, but it is not impossible.
The writer is an analyst and commentator.