Musharraf rules out emergency, polls postponement

Islamabad, Mar 20: Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has said parliamentary elections due this year will be held as scheduled and ruled out imposition of emergency in the country.

''Neither will emergency be imposed nor are elections going to be postponed,'' Gen Musharraf said in a GEO TV talk show last night.

Gen Musharraf chose to appear in the talk show ten days after a crisis, which gripped the country in the wake of his decision to send a reference against the sitting Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry to the Supreme Judicial Council under charges of misconduct and misuse of authority.

The suspended Chief Justice is to appear before the council for the third time tomorrow to face the charges amid fresh countrywide protest call by leading Islamic opposition alliance, Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA).

The MMA rally would also be joined by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League, an MMA spokesman told UNI here.

MMA chief Qazi Hussain Ahmad was briefly arrested along with other MMA leaders here when he tried to break police cordon in front of the parliament to reach the Supreme Court building.

Gen Musharraf said Rana Bhagwandas would assume office of the acting Chief Justice as soon as he returns. ''We had to appoint Justice Javed Iqbal as the acting CJ in the absence of Bhagwandas, who proceeded on leave with the permission of Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry,'' he said.

However, this was for the first time Gen Musharraf admitted his failure in properly handling the situation, since the crisis surfaced.

He said the judicial crisis was ''mishandled'' by him because he had not promptly taken the nation into confidence on all the relevant legal and constitutional issues. ''I think a government spokesman, if not me, should have taken people into confidence,'' he added.

UNI

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