Interesting times are never far away from the Pakistani political scene. When the debate was focused on the RGST and whether the government would be able to rustle up the legislative muscle to ram it through both houses of the parliament, the prime ministers showing the exit to a brace of ministers from his cabinet provided the spark that made the JUI(F) walk out of the coalition in a huff.
This made JUI-F the first party to exit from the carefully constructed and well coalesced coalition since the early-days departure of the PML(N). This event definitely put the PPP and its government in some discomfiture because the MQM was already straining to unleash its own raft of demands that it expected to be met or else.
Announcing the separation, the manner and tone of the JUI supremo Maulana Fazalur Rehman was anything but belligerent. He was all matter-of-fact, complaining about the unilaterality of the PMs decision and how it violated the consultation that is a prerequisite in a coalition prior to a precipitate action.
It was scant relief for Maulana and his camp followers that PM Yousuf Raza Gilani also had fired the minister from his own party against whom Azam Swati, the now-dismissed JUI(F) nominated federal minister for science and technology was raking considerable muck. Yet no frothing at the mouth, no threats of dire consequences not even quitting from the Balochistan government or relinquishing from chairman of the Islamic Ideology Council that it had eked out of the government only recently.
This double sacking coincided with the PPPs firebrand Sindh home minister Zulfiqar Mirza laying into the MQM in terms that were quite deliberately blunt. Deprived of the Karachi Nazims fief, the prima donnas of MQM were already nursing their own grouses for a while. The Mirza diatribe inflamed them enough to get two MQM Rabita Committees, the one at Karachi and the other ensconced in exile in London, to deliberate on the situation.
For the PPP government, things seemed to be unraveling, or so some political pundits and media commentators, so wanted us to believe. But would it get to a point where it takes this fourth PPP government to fall was the big question?
For its part, in this crisis, so far the PPP government did show some grace and a measure of spine, not to mention making a few deft moves of its own. For instance, playing the parleys with PML (Q) card that definitely had a sobering impact for this cancelled the indispensability of the MQM and JUI combined.
And while the PPP did try to repair and rectify the situation, it did so without overt signs of panic or bending backwards.
By the time one got to write these lines, the situation for the PPP already seemed to be on the mend.
The MQM gave the PPP a 10-day lifeline, only to distance itself from Mirzas comments. And there was at least one report, albeit an apparently credible one, that the Maulana was now malleable enough to consider a compromise that might lead to the JUI coming back to the coalition though not without a compensation of Shylockian proportion. This translates into getting the science and technology ministry back along with that of the religious affair that was previously manned by Swatis nemesis, Maulana Hamid Saeed Kazmi.
Now is that what the bone really was about? The genuineness or otherwise of the Hajj scam aside (for ages a shady business, but the sheer number of complaints and the scale of deprivation make it obvious that the plunder this time round was rapacious), most people with some political nous surmised that there were hues of sectarian one-upmanship involved.
For the uninitiated, the ministry of religious affairs not just oversees the lucrative Hajj operations but also decides on the doles to the madrassas. And in Kazmi, perhaps for the first time, a Barelvi was in command there. For those who fight over control of each and every mosque, this almost certainly was a bit too much to countenance.
So the disquiet seemed to be dying down, and the threat to the PPP-led coalition at the centre receded not just because of its own handling. Indeed it has to do a whole lot more to do with the objective conditions. For the moment, the political force that matters as an alternate claimant of power, the PML(N) would not want the push to the PPP government come to shove because it is not likely to gain anything out of it. As WikiLeaks confirm, the establishment may want Zardari out of the presidency but it has no love lost for Nawaz Sharif either.
Forcing mid-term elections or manufacturing an in-house change thus has no takers because it would be depriving the PPP from the can that it is all too willing to carry. Zardari and Gilani realise this, and this is the source of their poise and smugness.
The writer is Sports and Magazines Editor, Pakistan Today.
