ISLAMABAD, Sept 26: A nearly mature fall of two provincial governments appeared on Wednesday to be imminent after the latest Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal alliance decision to quit legislatures to further complicate the Oct 6 presidential election regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on opposition’s challenges to President Pervez Musharraf’s political ambitions.

The MMA government in the Frontier province will disappear automatically within 48 hours after Chief Minister Akram Khan Durrani asks the provincial governor, as is planned, to dissolve the 124-seat provincial assembly.

The PML-led Balochistan government of Chief Minister Jam Mohammad Yousaf will become politically untenable after losing support of the majority of the membership of the 65-seat provincial assembly after the MMA walks out of the coalition when most other opposition groups there could also resign their seats.The planned resignations or boycott by the entire opposition, including the country’s largest opposition party -- Pakistan People’s Party -- will hugely truncate a dying 1,170-member, but 702-vote, presidential electoral college of both houses of parliament and the four provincial assemblies.

Opposition members of the 100-seat Senate will not resign and only boycott the vote because their upper house is not subject to the next general elections to be held by the end of the year or early next year unlike the assemblies whose five-year term expires on Nov 15.

The present electoral college, whose demise is due on Nov 15, will still retain a majority of President Musharraf’s loyalists led by the ruling Pakistan Muslim League and including the Sindh-based Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the NWFP-based breakaway PPP faction led by Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao and some independent National Assembly members from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

But its massive depletion and the potential fall of two provincial governments will put the legitimacy of the exercise into question at home and abroad.

While a nine-judge Supreme Court bench seems close to concluding the hearing of several petitions challenging General Musharraf’s right to be president and army chief simultaneously and contest for what he calls a second and opposition says will be a constitutionally prohibited third presidential term, the general is likely to face more legal battles over his candidacy after he and some token, but important, challengers file their nomination papers before the Election Commission on Thursday.

The new legal challenges are likely to

emanate at the Election Commission, which made its own position somewhat controversial after it recently made changes in electoral rules that benefit the president, but will be carried on later before the Supreme Court, which is in an unusual keen focus of the domestic public opinion and an international community interested in Pakistan’s transition to full democracy after eight years of a military-led regime.

MMA’s resignation plans had appeared doubtful after its secretary-general and Leader of Opposition in the National Assembly Maulana Fazlur Rehman voiced reservations during a visit to Saudi Arabia last week after the newly-formed All Parties Democratic Movement (APDM), of which his alliance is the major component, set Sept 29 for the task.

But the row was declared resolved after the Maulana had a meeting of his own Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam party on Monday and then of the top body of the MMA on Tuesday, where pro-resignation sentiment seemed to have prevailed over vacillators unwilling to part with the fruits of being in power in the NWFP and Balochistan, some of whom are also seen as having a soft corner for President Musharraf.

The MMA says it will go with the APDM decision, for which the final go-ahead will come after the APDM meeting on Thursday in the MMA safe haven of Peshawar after a government crackdown against opposition protests and a security clampdown had made such a gathering difficult close to the scene of the real drama in Islamabad.