ISLAMABAD, Oct 3: The ARD which is meeting on Tuesday next is expected to do a lot of rethinking to find out answers to a plethora of questions thrown up by Nawabzada Nasrullah’s death.

Where is the opposition headed? Will the MMA stay with the opposition at the centre? What if it joined the government? Should the opposition opt for agitation? Is the situation ripe for street action? Will people come out on the streets without Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif?

But the most important question remains: Will the ARD survive? “Definitely,” says PPPP’s senator Raza Rabbani.

“The opposition has done a pretty good job given the circumstances. It has successfully proved its point that this government is sham and the National Assembly even less than a rubber stamp under the LFO,” claims Mr Rabbani.

He pointed out that the Commonwealth’s continued suspension of Pakistan’s membership had vindicated their position on the LFO. But he acknowledged that there was need to galvanize the public. The ARD, he said, was likely to approve the first phase of a mass contact movement with possible public meetings in Karachi, Quetta and Peshawer. A series of seminars and meetings will extend to Ramazan, Mr Rabbani added.

A unanimity of views is developing in the ARD that it needs to change tactics. PML-N’s Khawaja Asif says the opposition needs to put its act together. “We should at least equip ourselves to take advantage if any opportunity comes up, may be in six months,” he told Dawn on Thursday.

The PML-N ‘strategy rethinking,’ initially misconstrued as rebellion, was largely spearheaded by Chaudhary Nisar. His contention is that the opposition should be more imaginative in its tactics. It should keep its options flexible and decide on the basis of issues how and when to boycott, score a point, embarrass the government, or to simply make noise. This, he believes, will keep the government on its toes.

It seems the ARD is gradually coming down to believe what the Nawabzada had been saying all along: “No dictator leaves by choice, they are always forced to leave.”

ARD parties are working on a hotchpotch of ideas to bolster their protest in parliament from outside. The PPP’s Nahid Khan would like violent agitation. PML-N’s Ahsan Iqbal, while talking to Dawn , proposed that a report on ‘one year of Jamali’s misrule should be published. PPP Senator Anwer Beg suggests that a ‘white paper’ be published on the excesses of the government.

But the crucial question remains whether the movement will pick up without Benazir and Nawaz Sharif being willing to return to Pakistan. Why should lawyers, journalists or ordinary people fight when both the leaders are not ready to risk their necks and have been vying for ‘deals’ all along, political observers ask.

When this was put to Mr Rabbani he admitted that there was a disadvantage in not having the ‘big two’ but “the second and third lines are quite capable of handling the situation.

Khawaja Asif sounded more realistic when he acknowledged that “the erosion of Musharraf’s popularity was largely his own doing and the opposition can’t take credit for that.”

He quotes the examples of the referendum, then the handling of the local bodies and then the national election, followed by the “immoral way this government was tailored through defections.”

Chaudhary Nisar, in an informal discussion the other day, opined that the “aura of infallibility” maintained by General Musharraf is artificial. He quoted the late Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s example whose decade-old political colossus was “blown into pieces by a small incident at the Polytechnic Institute in Lahore. “Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s unchallenged might was ripped apart by what initially seemed like a ragtag coalition of tonga parties,” said Chaudhry Nisar.