The arrest of Riwan Ashraf while trying to cross over into India over the Rajasthan border, while carrying knives, and with the avowed intention of killing Nupur Sharma, the BJP spokeswoman whose blasphemous remarks about the Holy Prophet (PBUH) on a TV talk show led to her being sacked and loud protests from a number of Arab countries, should expose the counterproductive nature of patronizing such organizations as the Tehreek e Labbaik Pakistan (TLP). The recent Punjab by-elections saw the TLP wiped out, indicating that its message was not getting much traction among the public. Mr Ashraf is a fervent TLP member, whose previous high point had been destroying the equestrian statue of Maharaja Ranjit Singh outside the Lahore Fort. His membership of the TLP was perhaps inevitable, as the party had been founded by the late Maulana Khadim Hussain Rizvi to harness the fervour caused by Mumtaz Qadri’s assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer for blasphemy, and which had viewed the French President as a blasphemer, and thus had demanded that its Ambassador be expelled. Its links to the intelligence agencies, was notorious, by and it was because of this that Mr Justice Qazi Faiz Issa’s jugement on its Faizabad sit-in, had led to him being gunned for.
Now, it seems, the TLP has a member who has taken a stand that the agencies will find harmful to Pakistan. Ms Sharma is going to be portrayed by the BJP not as a blasphemer, but as the victim of a Pakistani intelligence operation, and even the indigenous attacks on her, which have already begun, will be tarred with that brush. Religious sentiments can be powerful forces too huge to be contained within the vessel of national interest. Even where the national interest is of a state created in the name of Islam, such sentiments may over flow those boundaries, as the sponsors of the TLP are finding out.
