LAHORE: Plagued by internal divisions and politically trimmed by low number of parliamentarians, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal’s Supreme Council would meet after Eid in a last-ditch effort to save the alliance.

According to insiders, the Jamaat-i-Islami facing internal pressure has been taking independent decisions after the elections and has spelled problems for the alliance as a cohesive unit. It refused to delay oath taking, celebrate Aug 14 as a “day of struggle” and finally told Maulana Abdul Akbar Chitrali, the lone JI member, to stay out of the prime ministerial voting, they said.

“Practically, there is hardly any space for the MMA,” says alliance president Maulana Fazlur Rehman. The numbers are so poor that the MMA cannot dictate anything, and has no choice but to let the bigger parties decide and see if it can follow them or not.

Conceding internal differences, he said the JI was facing some pressure from its central executive on certain issues, which is understandable. He told Dawn that MMA Secretary-General Liaquat Baloch telephoned him to tell that “an MMA meeting should be called to remove differences, which would be now called in the last week of the current month, after the Opposition’s APC on Aug 24 and JUI-F’s Central Executive meeting next day.

“I have just been told that PML-N President Shahbaz Sharif has convened the All Parties Conference (APC) on Aug 24 for strategising the presidential elections. So, the MMA would meet after that and see what future course of action it should take,” he said.

The Jamaat-i-Islami is equally ambivalent about the future of the alliance. When asked how it plans to vote for the presidential elections due on Sept 4, JI chief Sirajul Haq said: “The presidential election has still not been discussed at the alliance level. So, no one knows how it would be decided.”

“If the candidate is from the MMA component parties, the JI is bound to vote for him as part of the alliance. However, if there is an outsider, the JI, as it did in the prime ministerial elections, would decide for itself because then it would have seen if voting for a particular person would help further its election manifesto and implementation of Shariah laws,” he told Dawn.

The insiders, however, think that the alliance is practically a four-party grouping rather than five – excluding the Jamaat-i-Islami. “The JI practically left the alliance when it asked its lone member to abstain from voting, without consulting the MMA,” says an insider.

“Maulana Abdul Akbar Chitrali is, legally speaking, not a JI member, but an MMA member. He can even be proceeded against by the president and de-seated for violating the alliance discipline. Whether it is done or not is separate matter, but he can certainly be de-seated by the alliance chief, further reducing the JI strength. In presidential election, it certainly cannot be an MMA man and the JI would again be voting independently, further deepening its estrangement from the alliance,” he said.

Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2018