ISLAMABAD, May 12: Even as it missed a second deadline and suffered the withdrawal of a major partner, the PPP-led government renewed its pledge in the Senate on Monday to restore the pre-Nov 3 judiciary by undoing an ‘unconstitutional’ sacking of judges by President Pervez Musharraf.

Leader of the house Raza Rabbani of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) gave the assurance to a restive upper house shortly after the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) decided to pull out its nine minister from the coalition cabinet over the failure of the two major parties to agree on how to reinstate 60 deposed judges of the superior courts and while lawyers held nationwide protest marches to precede a new phase of their campaign for an independent judiciary.

Mr Rabbani’s reaffirmation of what he called his party’s commitment to the people of Pakistan was greeted with cheers from coalition partners but left many people guessing about when it could materialise after Sunday’s failure of the latest talks PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari and some of his non-political aides held with PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif in London.

As the National Assembly remained locked on the day the two parties had pledged to have a resolution passed by the powerful lower house for the reinstatement of these judges, the issue sparked fireworks in the upper house after a brief period of an unusual cordiality between the treasury and opposition benches when they hurriedly passed three private bills of an opposition member without any debate, including one restricting dowry and marriage gifts.

May 12 was the second deadline for the National Assembly resolution and the restoration of the judges set by the PPP and PML leader in their talks in Dubai last month when they skipped the first deadline of April 30 fixed in their joint Murree Declaration signed on March 9.

Tempers ran high in the Senate over the recall, on its first anniversary, of the massacre of about 50 people in Karachi on May 12, 2007 when a suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhdry was blocked from addressing a lawyers’ convention with senators from coalition-partner Awami National Party (ANP) and opposition Jamaat-i-Islami and Pashtunkhawa Milli Awami Party (PKMAP) obliquely and directly accusing the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) of being responsible for the incident and the MQM, while rejecting the charge, blaming an unexplained “conspiracy” to defame the Karachi-based party.

Mr Rabbani, who speaks for Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani in the Senate, said the PPP believed in the judiciary’s independence, wanted its restoration as it existed on Nov 2, 2007 and regarded President Musharraf’s Nov 3 emergency proclamation as chief of the army staff -- under which the judges were removed -- as ‘illegal and unconstitutional’.

He said the party had wanted the reinstatement of the judges, who lost their jobs for refusing or not being called to take oath under a Provisional Constitution Order, through a resolution of the National Assembly as committed in the Murree Declaration.

The difference between the two parties, he said, was ‘simply on modalities’ -- ‘which step should be taken first and which later’ -- while there was no dispute on restoring the Nov 2 position.

“The PPP stand is clear, and this is a commitment not only to PML-N but also to the working and poor people of Pakistan, which we will God-willing fulfil,” he said.

Earlier, when senators of various parties aired their complaints through points of order, a dissident of the formerly ruling Pakistan Muslim League (PML) and ex-minister, Neelofar Bakhtiar, promised to move a resolution of her own in the upper house for the reinstatement of judges because nothing had been done by the National Assembly.

Information and Broadcasting Minister Sherry Rehman dismissed as untrue PML secretary-general Mushahid Hussain Syed’s complaints, based on a newspaper report and a telephone call, that the Geo private television network was being denied a licence for an English-language channel as an act of victimization and that the prime minister’s adviser on interior Rehman Malik had made threats to an anchorperson of the same network.

She quoted Mr Zardari as well as denying that Mr Malik had made a telephonic threat to Geo’s Shahid Masood and said the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority had withheld issuance of a licence probably for non-clearance by a ‘sensitive agency’ with some other applicants as well under a law given by the previous government and there was no question of targeting Geo.

PRIVATE BILLS PASSED: All three private bills that were passed and must be adopted by the National Assembly to become laws, were authored by PML’s senior parliamentarian Chuadhry Mohammad Anwar Bhinder.