HE walks haltingly with his son and disciples in tow, pausing occasionally to catch a breath to resume the conversation. At 77, the tall, turbaned Maulana Samiul Haq’s gait may have been hampered by knee-joint pain, but give him an opportunity to seize the limelight and he would pounce on it like a tiger.

Publicly, he calls the Taliban “my own children” but privately the ‘Father of the Taliban’ makes an effort to draw a distinction between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani variety.

“I don’t know who they are,” he told Dawn in an interview, while referring to the Pakistani militants.

Why, then, would the septuagenarian leader from Akora Khattak, whose 66-year-old seminary has produced the likes of Mullah Mohammad Omar — the Afghan Taliban supremo — trudge the path his own son admits is fraught with danger so happily?

For nearly three months, Samiul Haq pursued Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s military secretary for an appointment to present, in the words of somebody in the know, a set of nuskhas or prescriptions to overcome the raging militancy in Pakistan.

The audience was granted. Samiul Haq, with his son Hamidul Haq in tow, met the premier. His nuskhas did not contain any new ingredients. “All he wanted was a nod,” the person aware of what transpired in the meeting said.

And he got one. A sceptical Sharif nodded his head and that was it. The maulana was out on the media, claiming he had been tasked by the prime minister to initiate a peace dialogue with the Taliban.

He got what he wanted. He was back in the game, sidestepping, in his own reckoning, his chief rival, Maulana Fazlur Rehman.

Sixteen years younger than Sami, Fazlur Rehman is no novice to the game. Indeed, according to some political commentators, Sami is no match for the wily and more worldly-wise politician from Abdulkhel in Dera Ismail Khan.

The JUI-F leader immediately went on the front foot, downplaying the significance of the PM tasking the other maulana to get the dialogue process rolling. But privately, a seemingly nervous Fazl also sought a clarification of sorts from Sharif. Nothing doing, he was told. Sami’s was only a courtesy call.

But while the two maulanas nudge and jostle to spoil the broth for each other, in jumps PTI chairman Imran Khan, endorsing Sami’s bid to bring much-needed peace to Pakistan, describing him as the right choice.

Now Imran may have genuinely believed Samiul Haq could deliver. But the maulana from Akora Khattak, who had supported the polio vaccination campaign in PTI-ruled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, could also deny Fazlur Rehman the opportunity to become the sole arbiter of peace in the region.

That Imran and Fazlur Rehman have no love lost for each other is no secret. But what has added to this mutually acrimonious relationship is Fazlur Rehman’s bid to topple the PTI government in this northwestern province.

This is politics at its best — manoeuvres with no real substance. But there is one man who may have played an unwitting masterstroke and who stands to gain the most: Nawaz Sharif.

With one stroke, he has silenced the most ardent of advocates of peace talks with the Taliban. Samiul Haq, who together with the Jamaat-i-Islami, spoke vehemently in support of the peace talks with the Taliban at a recent Defae Pakistan rally in Peshawar, is now quietly considering his next move.

Imran, who would take a swipe at Sharif for his failure to initiate the dialogue, is also quiet, having endorsed Sami’s bid for peace overtures.

As for the wily Fazlur Rehman, there is much more at stake in KP than just the elusive peace in the tribal region and so he is biding his time, waiting for an opportune moment without risking a strained relationship with the PML-N government in Islamabad, whose support he would direly need as and when he moves to pull the plug on the PTI.

As for the peace talks, nothing is happening. Absolutely nothing.