The Jamaat Islami protest against the Sindh Local Government Act ended on Saturday after 29 days, with the agreement between the Jamaat and government teams to implement the Jamaat demands. Though the Jamaat did win acceptance of its demands that more departments be placed under mayors, that the mayor of Karachi head the Water and Sewerage and Waste Management, Boards, and over the formation of the provincial finance commission; in a way, it is irrelevant what exactly was agreed. More to the point, the Jamaat succeeded because of the political process that it followed. It carried out a sit-in at the height of winter, but perhaps more importantly, it avoided violence.
Avoiding violence may only have become a virtue now that so many people and parties have lost it. Only a day before the Jamaat success, the MQM (P) clashed with the administration and one of its workers died. There have been displays aplenty of hotheadedness and bad manners, which might provide a fleeting satisfaction, but which fail to provide any agreement. It may have helped the current negotiation that the PTI was not part of it; otherwise someone was likely to have acted as a disruptor. The Jamaat itself would do well to profit from this example, for its student wing, the Islami Jamiat Tulaba, has won a reputation for mayhem, but that has not translated into any political gain for the Jamaat.
The issue is not so much to build a culture among political parties of tolerance, so much as to recapture a culture that is lost. The ruling PTI can claim to have reached an agreement with the Tehrik-i-Labbaik Pakistan, but that was brokered by others. The Jamaat-PPP agreement showed that there need not be any shadowy and mysterious presences around to make political parties come to an agreement. As in this instance, the agreement, and thus the preceding discussion, was about an electoral-cum-executive issue, rather than about the release of leaders and workers. That is where political parties are best engaged, contrary to the belief of some.
