Dawn (September 21) reported that the last day of filing nominations is the 27th, with Minister for Railways Sheikh Rashid Ahmed saying that the president would contest the election in uniform but he would meet his commitment to “doff the uniform” after polls and would take oath as a civilian president. The minister qualified that were the assemblies to be dissolved before his own election, President Musharraf would continue to be army chief.

According to another report, a Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Rana Bhagwandas rejected Imran Khan’s plea that the amendment to the Presidential Election Rules be revoked.

In Dawn’s editorial: “Immediately after the EC announced the date, the opposition lost no time in condemning the presidential move. Surprising as it looks, the opposition stalwarts have still not come to a consensus on the question of resignations... All this when the Supreme Court is still hearing the crucial petitions challenging President Musharraf’s right to don two hats and to his right to contest a presidential election. What happens if the apex court accepts the petitions and bars Gen Musharraf from seeking a re-election?” Friday’s Daily Times cited PPP spokesman Farhatullah Babar’s statement that their legislators would not resign from the assemblies if three conditions were met: “if Gen Musharraf doffs his uniform before contesting the presidential poll, removes the ban on third-time premiers and withdraws cases against Benazir and other leaders who have not been convicted in any court for the last 10 years.”

And then to Karachi

Bhutto too made more clear her schedule, by announcing that she would return to Karachi on October 18. The Daily Times (September 16) tried to make sense of the geography of her homecoming: “She has chosen to land at Karachi this time for significant reasons... Out in the streets, the MQM-cadre party is almost unchallenged by any of its rivals. It must be noted, however, that when the PPP-Musharraf ‘deal’ was being negotiated, it was the PML chief minister of Sindh who condemned it. The voice of protest arose, as it were, from a Sindhi rival of the PPP, but not from the formerly anti-Sindhi MQM. In fact, out of the ruling coalition, MQM was the most positively inclined towards the ‘deal’. Bhutto is therefore testing the waters of MQM tolerance in her province where she expects to form a government in coalition with the MQM... Her decision not to come to Lahore has probably been prompted by the harsh reaction shown by the chief minister of Punjab, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, to the proposed ‘deal’ with President Musharraf.”

In transit

Kamran Shafi (Dawn, September 18) summarised a raging political debate, that has also found utterance on the pages of the Daily Times in recent weeks, between the “transitionists” and the “transformationists”. “The transitionists say there should be a deal between (Bhutto and Musharraf) because they are both ‘liberals’ and because getting rid of Musharraf at this fraught time would invite a hard-line general, and therefore the obscurantists, into power... They also say that a transformation from army to civil rule is not possible because of ‘structural’ problems and that the only way is through a gradual transition. Lastly, they imply that the tranformationists are anti-American and, therefore, want to get rid of Musharraf.”

The transformationists “are of the view that the time is here for civil society, made up of the mass of the Pakistani people and their political parties, to send a clear message to the army high command... that enough is enough and that it will never again be permitted to presume that it has the answers to our country’s problems.”