By Sayyed Khan, Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 18 October 2025, www.thecommunists.net

As part of the global wave of pro-Palestine protests, the right-wing religious party Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) has organized a large march in recent days. However, state authorities mobilised thousands of police and did everything in their power to brutally crush the “Al-Aqsa Gaza March”. According to an official government statement three TLP were killed, many more injured and 2,700 people arrested.

However, TLP officials claim that hundreds of its supporters have been killed by the police. Furthermore, the two leaders of the party – the brothers Saad and Anas Hussain Rizvi – have been missing and could be detained or killed. Currently, the provincial government of Punjab is seeking federal approval to ban the TLP.

As Marxists we have no political sympathy for the TLP. It is an ultra-reactionary party which has focused in the past on organizing blasphemy-related protests. It has also been responsible for attacks against religious minorities, particularly Christians and Ahmadis. Clearly, the workers and popular movement must confront such a party and protect minorities by any means necessary.

It is however telling that the government has not done anything against the TLP when it organized such reactionary blasphemy-related protests. It acts only now when this party mobilises in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The reason is obviously that there exists widespread popular support for the cause of Palestinian liberation while the government supports Trump’s colonial plan to disarm the resistance and to transform Gaza into a protectorate controlled by the American-Zionist occupation. Islamabad has even offered to send troops for the so-called “International Stabilization Force” which shall act as the armed fist of the occupation against the Palestinian people.

Supporters of the RCIT have no political sympathy for the TLP. However, we strongly oppose the ban and the brutal suppression of this party. Why? First, as a principle we do not call for the banning of reactionary parties by the capitalist state – even if they are fascists. We can not support the expansion of the repressive state apparatus and its powers. This is even more so as the government is currently a much bigger threat for the peoples in Pakistan (and Afghanistan!) than a small party like the TLP.

Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, once wrote: "The bourgeoisie will never willingly consent to measures that can pull society out of chaos. It wants to perpetuate all its privileges, and in order to protect them it is starting to use fascist gangs. Our slogan is not the disarming of the fascist gangs of finance capital by finance capital’s own police. We refuse to spread the criminal illusion that a capitalist government can actually proceed to the disarming of the capitalist bands. The exploited must defend themselves against the capitalists. Arming of the proletariat, arming of the poor peasants! People’s Antifascist Militia!“ ^[1]

Hence, he emphasized “That is why the slogan for the disbanding and disarming of the fascist gangs by the state (and voting for similar measures) is reactionary through and through.” ^[2]

Socialists should not support such ban even more as it is the result of the suppression of a march in solidarity with the Palestinian people and its heroic resistance who have fought the Zionist occupation for two years despite the horrendous genocide in Gaza.

We repeat that we have not the slightest political sympathy for the ultra-reactionary TLP. But the main enemy today is the bourgeois government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif – representing the alliance of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). It is this government which brutally suppresses the peoples of Kashmir, Balochistan and other regions. It is this government which wages reactionary attacks against Afghanistan and kills dozens of civilians. [3] It is therefore completely illegitimate for socialists to support attempts of such a government to eliminate its political opponents!