Daily Times

The matter of an opposition alliance to pressure the government into stepping down has been in and out of the headlines for a while now. It seemed that whatever energy all the the participants were able to build up dissipated once JUI-F’s so called dharna fizzled out, mainly because of lukewarm support from the main opposition parties PML-N and PPP. Now, if sources quoted in the main press are to be trusted, the smaller opposition parties are not happy at all with PPP and PML-N because they supported the government in parliament over the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) related legislation and now want in writing from both parties that they will extend full support before they can get round to convening the long delayed Multi Party Conference MPC, which will fine tune all the details.

And it’s little surprise that the meeting where the demand for a written deal was proposed was held at the residence of Maulana Fazlur Rahman. He has been the principal architect of all anti-government initiatives right from the time that the general election results came out in 2018. Yet, strange though the demand for written commitment is, it is difficult to understand just how they expect the sitting government to pack up and call a fresh election just because all of them overcame their own petty differences long enough to badmouth everybody in power and all their policies. The maulana should know the difficulties in pulling off a dharna and then maintaining it. There’s only so long you can say the same things again and again to the same crowd and just hope that the government falls. Even PTI’s famous sit-in, which the opposition now accuses of being backed by the so-called establishment, was not able to achieve its prime aim in the end.

Democracies have very clearly defined rules for the opposition. If all the parties now out of power check the government wherever it steps over a line, and make sure everybody knows about it, then its actions are pretty much justified. But if its main problem is being suddenly out of the halls of power, something that the government says has disturbed the maulana to no end, then any unnecessary criticism of the government really earns nobody any points in the end. Perhaps that is why the more mature of the opposition parties, PPP and PML-N, chose the path of prudence. What will become of the demand of the written commitment, if it is indeed true, and the MPC, remains to be seen. But it doesn’t seem that the government is going anywhere anytime soon. *