PESHAWAR, Oct 4: The Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam of Maulana Fazlur Rehman has come under tremendous pressure as one party in the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal and two of its allies in the All Parties Democratic Alliance announced on Thursday that they would resign from the NWFP Assembly on Friday.
Awami National Party’s central information secretary Zahid Khan told Dawn on phone that his party had decided to resign and seven of its MPAs would submit their resignations to the speaker.
“We have decided to submit our resignations, whether anybody joins us or not,” Mr Khan said.
Parliamentary leader of Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) in the provincial assembly Anwar Kamal Khan Marwat said that his party’s five MPAs would also resign.
He said that the Jamaat-i-Islami too had agreed and 26 of its legislators would submit their resignations.
“We are part of the APDM and we had agreed to resign or get the NWFP assembly dissolved before the presidential election on Saturday. But JUI-F’s foot-dragging is causing us a lot of humiliation and this is something we can’t accept, regardless of what the legislators of Fazl’s party or the JI do,” Mr. Marwat told Dawn.
The JI, however, was still in a fix but its provincial chief Sirajul Haq, who was a minister till recently, said he and his colleagues were likely to resign from the NWFP assembly on Friday. “There is a high probability that we will resign,” he said.
This dramatic development has caused a commotion in political activity and reports said the JUI(F) leaders had gone into a meeting to discuss the situation and take their own decision.
But Maulana Fazl’s allies in the APDM were sceptical of his intentions and said that they now seriously suspected that he was trying to make the best of both worlds. “He is not only having the cake, he is eating it too,” is how one APDM leader described his attempt to give some leeway to Gen Musharraf and also play the opposition role.
Sources in the anti-Musharraf alliance told Dawn that the parties in the APDM had made it clear to Maulana Fazl that they would rather resign than wait for the dissolution of the NWFP assembly after the presidential poll.
The sources said that lawmakers of the PML-N, ANP and JI in the NWFP assembly were in agreement to resign en bloc on Friday with or without the JUI(F) following suit. However, said one source, a last-ditch effort was being made to persuade Maulana Fazl to join the APDM in resigning from the assembly, instead of waiting it out until after the presidential poll.
