ISLAMABAD, March 9 A vow by the Pakistan People's Party and Pakistan Muslim League-N on Sunday to restore about 60 deposed judges of the superior courts through a parliamentary resolution poses a new, and very serious, challenge to President Pervez Musharraf, as the two parties seem close to taking power under a man they don't like.

It was after some dithering that the top leaders of the two rivals-turned-allies swapped concessions in the cool clime of Murree hills to send a harassing message to an isolated president that promises a hot spring for him and a tense post-election transition.

The PML-N agreed to be part of a PPP-led federal cabinet and possibly allow its ministers to be administered oath by a president the party does not recognise as legitimate apparently in return for the PPP's agreement to set a deadline for the restoration of the pre-Nov 3, 2007, judiciary through a resolution “to be passed by the National Assembly within 30 days of the formation of the federal government”.

The decision taken in talks between PPP co-chairman Asif Ali Zadari and PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif in Murree is bound to worry Mr Musharraf who has made it clear he will not countenance the restoration of Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and his sacked colleagues in the Supreme Court and the four provincial high courts who could reopen legal challenges to his presidency that were blocked by the Nov 3 emergency.

The PPP-PML-N pledge to do it come what may will mean a direct confrontation between a popular coalition government and a president who, after giving up his army uniform and suffering a huge loss in public rating, has little to fall back upon except his defeated loyalists and the controversial constitutional powers he still wields but which both his opponents and some supporters want to clip.

A debate is likely to heat up across the country over whether a mere National Assembly resolution can restore the judges who lost their jobs for refusing or not being called to take the oath under a Provisional Constitution Order issued with the proclamation of the state of emergency that Mr Musharraf declared on Nov 3, 2007, in his now-abandoned capacity of the chief of the army staff.

The present caretaker government and its legal brains argue that the Nov 3 emergency and the PCO, upheld by a post-PCO Supreme Court, are protected by constitutional amendments the president had decreed before lifting the emergency and, therefore, cannot be overturned without another constitutional amendment, which must be passed by two-thirds majorities in each of the two houses of parliament.

But the leaders of an agitating legal community, including Supreme Court Bar Association president Aitzaz Ahsan, think the judges were sacked by then army chief without any constitutional authority and in defiance of an anti-PCO ruling given by a pre-PCO Supreme Court bench hours before the proclamation of emergency mainly to avoid an adverse ruling by a Supreme Court bench about his candidacy for the president, and that all of them can be restored to their positions by a simple executive order.

The PPP had promised before and after the Feb 18 elections that the question of the deposed judges as well as of the independence of judiciary would be decided in parliament. But now a compromise seems to have been found to restore the judges as the first step towards an independent judiciary through a resolution of the lower house, whose passage will be a certainty with the PPP, PML-N, their coalition partner Awami National Party and other opposition groupings such as the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal already having a two-thirds majority in the 342-seat house.

It is yet to be seen how legal experts of the coalition find ways to translate a resolution into reality and what fate awaits the present Chief Justice Abdul Hamid Dogar and all those appointed to the Supreme Court and the four high courts to fill vacancies caused by the PCO.

CAN PRESIDENT BLOCK IT?

While it may be more than a week before a new government takes office and then there will be a full one month for the National Assembly to pass a restoration resolution for judges, a question mark remains about whether the president will try to stop the move or to acquiesce to risk his office.

A restored Supreme Court could reopen the challenges posed to his presidential election in October, 2007, from a dying parliamentary electoral college while he was still in army uniform.

While he is left with little power of bargaining with his victorious opponents and his supporters are now only a dejected minority in the National Assembly, any move to go to his own hand-picked judiciary for help is bound to evoke more resistance from a charged legal community which will no longer face police batons and tear-gassing for protests.

And a resort to the extreme measure of using article 58(2)b to dissolve the National Assembly so soon after the elections can be more disastrous for the president and create a political storm with unimaginable consequences.