ISLAMABAD, Sept 10: With national elections nearly a month away, the country’s two main political parties are keeping alive hopes about an early end to the exile of their leaders — former rivals-turned-allies Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

A Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) official said on Tuesday Benazir’s return before the Oct 10 elections would depend on the fate of petitions she had filed before courts to break through a wall of decrees barring her from the contest.

But the Pakistan Muslim League (N) seemed pinning hopes on a change of policy by the military government, which it said had made abortive efforts for a political deal with it.

The government denies having tried for deals with any party, but a PML(N) spokesman said President Gen Pervez Musharraf had used emissaries for a deal with Nawaz, whom he toppled on Oct 12, 1999, and sent to a 10-year exile to Saudi Arabia in December 2000.

The Sindh High Court is due to hear on Wednesday Benazir’s petitions against presidential decrees that effectively bar her and Nawaz from elections because of their court convictions and from ever becoming prime ministers again because both held that office for two terms, though short-lived.

Her appeals against the rejection of her nomination papers for two general seats and one special women’s seat of the National Assembly from Sindh will be heard by an appellant tribunal in Karachi on Thursday.

“We will see what happens there,” a PPP spokesman in Islamabad, Nazir Dhoki, told Dawn.

Benazir, who has lived abroad in self-imposed exile since 1998, had initially said she would return to contest the elections despite the government’s threats to arrest and try her for controversial corruption charges.

But in recent interviews, she said she had deferred her plans for the time being.

“The option is there,” Benazir’s spokesman Farhatullah Babar said when asked if the former premier was still keeping the return option open.

But he added that he was still awaiting a word about decisions taken in Benazir’s meeting in Dubai at the weekend with senior party leaders, including Makhdoom Amin Fahim, who heads the PPP’s electoral formation called the PPP Parliamentarians.

Dhoki said Fahim’s team would return to Karachi on Wednesday and was then likely to speak about the Dubai meeting, which Benazir had called to discuss plans to step up the election campaign and cooperate with the PML(N) and other components of the 15-party Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy.

PML(N) central information secretary Siddiqul Farooq said Nawaz and his younger brother Shahbaz Sharif wanted to return home and were keeping their luggage packed to end their Saudi exile anytime.

“They have kept their attache cases ready to board a plane and land in their motherland,” he told Dawn. “It is only the person of President Musharraf who feels threatened by their presence (in Pakistan).”

But he would not say how the Sharif brothers could return when President Musharraf had threatened to send them back by the next plane if they arrived in violation of what the government says was an exile deal brokered by Saudi authorities.

“The situation can change any moment,” he said, adding that it could happen either under domestic pressure or a realisation that what the government was doing was wrong.

The PML(N) denies there was a deal and says Sharif brothers and other members of their family were forced into exile.

While Nawaz avoided a possible rejection of his nomination papers for the National Assembly from Lahore by withdrawing these to protest at the rejection of Benazir’s papers, his wife Kulsoom and Shahbaz remain in the field despite their exile.