LAHORE, Dec 19: MMA secretary-general Maulana Fazlur Rehman said on Thursday that those who had been wielding power for the last three years were still not prepared to transfer it to the people.
“What they are doing now is a mere sharing of power that would lead to a tug-of-war between the army and the people and their institutions. This power struggle would not only be harmful for politics and democracy but also prove dangerous for the country,” the Maulana said.
He was talking to reporters after the inaugural session of South Asian Free Media Association’s National Conference on Freedom of Media and Governance at a local hotel.
The Maulana said the president was not ready to accede to the MMA demands and if Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali followed suit, the MMA would certainly not give him the vote of confidence. “Right now it is the government and not parliament that is hung,” he said.
The MMA leader said the alliance had so far adopted a conciliatory stance only for restoration of democracy but “cannot humiliate the mandate given to it by the people and would take steps to maintain its sanctity”.
When asked about chances of a confrontation, he said the MMA had never closed the doors of negotiations. However, he added, the people had already seen the attitude of the government and “we would see what happens if it does not agree to our demands”.
The Maulana said a protest day would be observed on Jan 3 to condemn American actions against the Muslim world, specially Iraq. There would be rallies and meetings all over the world, and the ulema would condemn America in their prayer sermons.
He parried a question whether he or Qazi Hussain Ahmad would sit in the National Security Council after getting elected Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly, and said that right now the MMA was rejecting it.
Earlier, speaking at the seminar, he said there was a prescribed process to create or amend the Constitution, which became controversial if someone ignored this procedure and made it hard for the stakeholders to forge a consensus.
The Maulana said that it was unfortunate that whenever the army grabbed power in Pakistan, it justified the action by saying that this had been done to save the country and placed democracy on the back burner.
“We lost a major portion of Taftan and three rivers under the Ayub regime, East Pakistan under the Yahya government and Siachin in the Zia era. And if Gen Pervez Musharraf stays in power, the future of Kashmir will not be safe either. In contrast, the country never lost even an inch of its land under civilian rule, he said. The MMA leader said local government was a provincial subject and should therefore be handed over to the provinces. Around 90 per cent of the district governments were not economically viable and could not, therefore, execute their development plans.
Under the existing system, the Maulana said, the services in districts would be sold to the people by the multinationals. “Those who once condemned the flight of capital have now made a room for it by allowing the foreign companies to run even welfare institutions on a commercial basis and transfer their profits abroad,” he said.