Benazir rejects call to delay return,” reported Friday’s Dawn from London. Benazir Bhutto’s statement at a press conference, that she would stick by her schedule to land at Karachi on October 18, was in response to President Pervez Musharraf’s request to her, through a television interview, that she put off her return till the Supreme Court pronounced on the validity of his presidential election. (It next hears the case on the 17th. The court has restrained the Election Commission from notifying the result till then.)

The day’s editorial took stock of this appeal and put Bhutto’s itinerary in the context of a wider timetable. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said this week that once the present assemblies — provincial and national — complete their terms next month, caretaker governments would take over.

Assembly elections, he specified, would take place in January. This announcement, according to the editorial, carries confidence that the result of the October 6 presidential election — swept, in unofficial counts, by Musharraf — will be upheld by the court. “People are also bound to wonder,” it added, “whether the question of delaying Bhutto’s return has anything to do with the fate of the National Reconciliation Ordinance, which, apart from being controversial, has been challenged in court. One wishes the president had been asked to elaborate on the reason for his advice to Bhutto.”

President Musharraf “is fearful about the role Bhutto can play in the worst-case scenario,” agreed The Daily Times in its editorial (October 12). “What if the court finds against him and he has to impose emergency or any other order curtailing the constitutional provisions making his exit certain?” Also: “There is talk of the caretaker prime minister being proposed by the PPP, possibly a personality not too objectionable to the ruling party, but anathema to the PMLN and the religious parties. A reliable prime minister would be of great value to the PPP for the January general election.

... contd.