Azadi March to leave its imprint on political chessboard.

ISLAMABAD -- Maulana Fazlur Rehman's Azadi March is turning out to be as mystifying and perplexing as his politics.

On the surface, the situation is a mess. A large number of people are camped at H9. All day these amassed men mill around the place; all evening they regale themselves with speeches by an assortment of opposition grandees. The evening climaxes with the address of their undisputed leader who tells them, night after night, to wait for his instructions. Those instructions are still being baked in the oven of consultations that don't seem to reach the right warmth.

Read: Here comes the maulana

It started with the timing. Insiders from PML-N and PPP say the Maulana was insistent on the Oct 31 date. Key leaders from both the main opposition parties had - in their meetings with him in the days leading up to the Azadi March - urged him to delay the march for a few months. They had their reasons. They told him. He had his reasons. He did not tell them.

'We asked him directly why he was adamant on this date,' said a senior opposition leader who had sat in on these meetings in Lahore, 'but he would just smile and say nothing.' This Maulana's mystery is still hanging over the federal capital like a political smog. But at what cost? And to whom?

Cost to PML-N

The general consensus within the party was not in favour of joining the Maulana's march - at least not fully and wholeheartedly.

For now, Maulana has absorbed the snub by PML-N in Lahore with a straight, smiling face

The logic was as follows: we do not know how far the Maulana will go in his actions and we should not become part of any event that destabilises the system. After all, they argued, how can we become part of a dharna (sit-in) when we had been criticising the dharna politics of Imran Khan.

These leaders wondered aloud in their internal meetings how their party could play the junior partner to JUI-F.

Then there was this little matter of the incarceration of Nawaz Sharif and Maryam Nawaz and the behind-the-scenes efforts to find a way out for them. These were delicate times, PML-N leaders argued, and delicate times are not served well by decisions that can swirl around like Thor's hammer. But then came a letter and changed things.

Nawaz wrote the letter to Shahbaz; Shahbaz showed the letter to Ahsan Iqbal and friends; Ahsan Iqbal took the letter to the Maulana, and thus was birthed a new short-term PML-N policy: extend full support to the JUI-F chief.

Simple enough? Not...