As Maulana Fazlur Rahman’s so called Azadi March fast approaches, it is important for both PMLN and PPP to recall the historical antecedents of the Maulana and his party. His father Maulana Mufti Mahmood was a leading light of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-Hind and one of the most firebrand opponents of the Muslim League and the Pakistan Movement. Mufti Mahmood was amongst those ulema, led by Maulana Ahmad Hassan Madni who claimed that the leaders of the Muslim League, especially Mr. Jinnah, were westernized almost-Kafirs and that the Pakistan they were going to make was going to be un-Islamic. After partition the JUH remnants in Pakistan merged themselves into Shabbir Ahmad Usmani’s Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam. By 1956 they had taken over that party defeating the Usmanis and the Thanvis. In 1971 Mufti Mahmood uttered that famous sentence “Thank God we were not part of the sin of making Pakistan.” In 1974 after successfully initiating and leading the agitation against Ahmadis, Mufti and his allies prevailed on Bhutto to pass the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan which was an abject surrender to religious bigotry and fanaticism. Not content though with Bhutto’s appeasement, Mufti then led the nine party alliance called PNA against Bhutto’s government in 1977 in the name of “Nizam-e-Mustafa.” This laid the foundations of 11 years of radicalization of Pakistan under General Zia

It is true that in 1988 the deep state that cobbled together the IJI looked at Sami-ul-Haq faction of the JUI more favourably than Fazlur-e-Rahman’s faction but Fazlur Rahman was no less a committed ideologue and mouthpiece for the Taliban than Maulana Sami-ul-Haq. In 2002 Fazlur Rahman was the prime ministerial candidate for MMA against Zafrullah Khan Jamali of PMLQ and Shah Mahmood Qureshi of PPP. Ironically the single member of the PTI in the assembly, Imran Khan, voted for Fazlur Rahman while denouncing Jamali and Qureshi as pro-Musharraf crooks. In 2002 Maulana Fazlur Rahman was for Imran Khan the epitome of religious virtue, upright character. Obviously the longer game played by establishment in the cobbling together of MMA was entirely lost on Pakistan’s future Prime Minister. The MMA government in the then NWFP province was to brought into power to put pressure on the Americans. As quid pro quo, the MMA helped pass Musharraf’s 17th Amendment in the parliament.