Who is Khadim Hussain Rizvi? How has he earned a place among the major makers and breakers of news in 2018?

A madrasa graduate hailing from Pindi Gheb area of Attock district, he has worked for long as a khateeb (sermoniser) at a mosque attached to a saint’s tomb near Data Darbar in Lahore. For more than two decades, his career remained rather unremarkable.

This changed in January 2011.

A few weeks earlier, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer had met Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman imprisoned on blasphemy charges, and sought a review of the blasphemy laws. His security guard, Mumtaz Qadri, later killed him in Islamabad for doing that. Rizvi was among many clerics who issued a fatwa, asking people not to take part in Taseer’s funeral prayer.

Soon, Rizvi helped launch Tehreek-e-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah, an umbrella group consisting of many religious entities and leaders. It cut its political teeth by agitating against Qadri’s imprisonment and trial and later his death sentence. After he was executed in February 2016, the tehreek organised another series of protests including a violent one in the federal capital, Islamabad, right after his funeral prayer in the nearby city of Rawalpindi.

About a month prior to that, law enforcement agencies used force to disrupt a protest rally that Rizvi headed in Lahore. The extensive media coverage of the incident created a ripple, if not a wave, of sympathy for him and his tehreek in central parts of Punjab.

The grass-roots level mobilisation that he launched after Qadri’s execution helped him gather a few hundred highly charged protesters just outside Islamabad in November 2017 after the government made some changes in electoral nomination forms. He and his supporters saw those changes as an attempt to water down the importance of the finality of prophethood as a central tenet of Islam. The gathering, etched into public memory as the Faizabad dharna, or sit-in, was often violent, always cantankerous and never willing to cooperate with the authorities. After Rizvi gave a call for a country-wide traffic shut down in late November 2017, security and intelligence agencies got involved to put an end to the dharna through a negotiated settlement. Later, a senior official of a security agency distributed money among the dharna participants to facilitate their return home. Soon, they had another reward: federal law minister Zahid Hamid resigned in a major concession to their protest.

Only weeks before the dharna, Rizvi and his associates had their tehreek registered as a political party called Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan. Come elections in July 2018 and the party would field hundreds of candidates across Pakistan. In the event, it garnered more than two million votes, mostly from central Punjab and Karachi, though only two of its candidates, both for Sindh Assembly, could get elected. In many constituencies, they did contribute to the defeat of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) candidates.

Buoyed by the popularity he had gained after the Faizabad dharna and emboldened by his electoral performance, Rizvi upped the ante on his rhetoric by threatening to launch another country-wide agitation after Aasia Bibi was acquitted by the Supreme Court in October 2018. The government’s response oscillated between a half-hearted crackdown against his violent followers and outright appeasement. Soon, the authorities cut a deal to have the protest call withdrawn in return for disallowing Aasia Bibi from going abroad until a final appeal in her case is heard and decided.

Through all these developments, Rizvi - known as Baba Ji among his followers – has acquired all the features of a populist politician: a no-holds-barred inflammatory rhetoric, an open challenge to the ‘corrupt’ elites to mend their ways and an unabashed exploitation of highly touchy religious issues. He has spiked these ingredients with a self-belief that borders on arrogance, one that has been boosted enormously due to the state’s lackadaisical response to his disruptive politics.

Over the last three years, his religious populism has helped him wedge himself into Pakistan’s religious-political landscape mainly by exploiting the sense of neglect among Barelvis who always think that the state is sympathetic, even partial, to their rival Sunni group, Deobandis. The latter has acquired political eminence and amassed muscle power on the back of its participation in the state-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan since the 1980s.

To o qualify for his appointment as a khateeb at a mosque run by the Punjab government’s Auqaf Department, Rizvi needed to have a proven affiliation with the Barelvi-Sunni school of thought but no political association. Once he was hired as a provincial government employee, he was required to avoid hate speech against other religions and sects and was particularly not allowed to speak against the state. He was always careful in his sermons except that he was also known among his audiences as a vocal supporter of the blasphemy laws and the finality of prophethood.

These two elements, along with his love for Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi, the founder of Barelvi Islam, would become the pillars of his politics. Barelvi leaders and parties in the past have tried to base their politics on these three factors but only with marginal success. Most Barelvi voters often vote on the advice of the custodians of Sufi shrines – the pirs and shaikhs – they follow. Since almost all of the politically active pirs and shaikhs contest elections as candidates of mainstream non-sectarian political parties, strictly Barelvi parties have almost always fared poorly in previous elections.

Even otherwise, these parties did not have a mass base. When, for instance, the blasphemy laws became politically salient in the wake of Qadri’s hanging, traditional Barelvi parties, such as Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan and its various factions, neither had popular leaders nor organisational mechanisms on the ground to mobilise people.

Enter Rizvi.

He and his Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan not just wiped out the politics of older Barelvi parties, they also threatened the electoral power enjoyed by pirs and shaikhs. This may explain why, in January 2018, the custodian of one of the most revered Sunni Sufi shrines in Punjab, Sial Sharif in Sargodha district, announced a provincial lockdown of Punjab, demanding the enforcement of shariah as well as the resignation of the then provincial law minister Rana Sanaullah for allegedly having committed blasphemy. Many of the shrine’s politically eminent followers, including a scion of the custodian himself, also distanced themselves from the then ruling PMLN.

The pirs and shaikhs might have realised that they needed to match Rizvi’s aggressive Barelvi politics to remain electorally relevant. The fact that they then joined the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in droves might have strengthened an impression among Barelvi voters that the pirs and mashaikh are always interested only in ensuring their own political survival.

Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan is sometimes seen as nothing but a coming together of politically ambitious, but socially and economically weak, clerics in search of an electoral salience. That may or may not be the case but what is clear is that Rizvi and his associates have mobilised a huge number of Barelvis to the extent that they are not hesitant in taking to the streets and even using violence to make themselves heard.

Even though their agitation has subsided after Rizvi’s detention in November 2018 under terrorism and treason charges, their potential to create large-scale trouble remains intact and can resurface as and when there is any development on any blasphemy-related subject, including giving Aasia Bibi her freedom of movement. They also remain aggressively active in cyberspace where they openly call for violence against anyone who has said or written anything even remotely perceived as opposing the blasphemy laws or undermining the finality of prophethood.

This constant state of mobilisation stems from Rizvi’s ability to have married a religious narrative with the socio-economic miseries of a working class that finds little voice in the political arena and even less representation in the making of the state’s policies. He tells them their salvation does not rest in trying to improve their worldly lot but in attaining an other-worldly redemption by working continuously for the twin causes of the blasphemy laws and the finality of prophethood.

Like the unsophisticated and bloodthirsty Punjabi film hero Maula Jutt, his typical follower never balks at advocating violence against the rich and the powerful to have his grievances addressed. As a rebel with no plan, he threatens to rid the country of its existing West-inspired order – by bloody means if so required – but offers only vague religious rhetoric about what should replace it.

Rizvi can verily be credited with introducing this highly destabilising force into Pakistan’s already not-so-stable polity. He has certainly succeeded where many earlier Barelvi leaders failed.

The writer is the director of Pak Institute for Peace Studies.

This article was originally published in the Herald's January 2019 issue under the headline. To read more subscribe to the Herald in print.