When the general secretary of the clerical MMA, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, wants to talk tough to the president of the MMA, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, he gets his party’s secretary general, Maulana Ghafoor Haideri, to hold forth. In his latest barrage, Maulana Haideri has called Qazi Sahib the “Gorbachev” of Pakistani politics who is ready to sacrifice his alliance to serve the ends of his “revolutionary” ideas. The issue was of course the resignations of Fazl’s JUI from the NWFP assembly which is under challenge from a vote of no-confidence and cannot be dissolved. The JUI was never keen on resigning and losing its strong position in the NWFP and Balochistan. When forced to do so in Quetta, it decided to dig in its heels in Peshawar.Strangely, Maulana Fazlur Rehman always appears to be a better politician. He was asked to dissolve the Peshawar assembly while the Supreme Court was seized of the matter of President Musharraf’s re-election. His repartee was: what if the Court found against Musharraf? No one answered. Now he says that the JUI should fight the no-confidence call because it can’t dissolve the assembly. He is right: resigning will not prevent General Musharraf from being re-elected. On the contrary, as Chaudhry Shujaat has suggested, the PMLQ might stretch out its hand to the JUI and prop up its government without the JI et al.