Azadi March conundrum.

Byline: Abbas Nasir

THERE can be little doubt that JUI-F chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman has assembled a huge crowd of supporters in Islamabad. But does he really feel that the pressure he will bring to bear on the powers that be will result in the resignation of Prime Minister Imran Khan as he is demanding?

Buoyed by the presence of tens of thousands of his supporters, the maulana who has acquired a reputation of making backroom deals in recent years, despite having a sterling record as an opposition politician during the MRD days in the 1980s, has also traded verbal blows with the army spokesman.

His remarks have not been in isolation; a number of his party leaders such as Mufti Kifayatullah and Maulana Hamdullah have, of late, openly called out what they believe to be transgressions by senior personnel of a key state institution. The JUI-F seems to be upping the ante as its leaders have dispensed with euphemisms and are more direct in their approach.

Even social media users opposed to the present dispensation are not generally as circumspect as they used to be. The fear that drove many of them off the platform after a few of them were picked up and given the third degree in the twilight of the Nawaz Sharif era now seems to have disappeared.

Anyone who wrote off the JUI-F chief as a politician and thought his career was over will now be discarding that script.

This apparent openness in the public discourse, despite extraordinary curbs on the media, should normally have been seen as a sign of weakness of unelected institutions and made the opposition political forces more aggressive, even euphoric.

Why then do the PPP and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari and the visible leadership of the PML-N appear reluctant to go the whole hog and commit large numbers of their supporters to the so-called Azadi March, even when Nawaz Sharif appears to have fully endorsed it?

This reluctance has earned the two parties and their leadership (minus the hospitalised Nawaz Sharif) considerable opprobrium from the more radical among opposition activists who believe that the time is right for a final, united push.

But all is not what meets the eye. Privately, some opposition sources point out that while both the PPP and PML-N wanted the maulana to postpone his march by a few months, the latter was adamant to go ahead with it on Oct 31.

'What's happening in November that is so crucial that he couldn't push back the date by a few months?' one source asked a rhetorical question...