June 02, 2008	Monday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 27, 1429

ISLAMABAD, June 1: The National Assembly begins its first budget session on Monday under the shadows of economic and political crises.

While the coalition, which blames most of its woes on its predecessors, has promised to come up with a budget friendly to both the poor and the business, it has kept the nation in a tormenting suspense, at the cost of its credibility, about the most pressing political issues of the promised restoration of deposed judges and the future of a discredited presidency.

The government, led by Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), has five days left to act on its unfulfilled parliamentary pledges to restore the judges before the presentation of the budget for fiscal 2008-09 on June 7, will bar consideration of other matters or face lawyers and other activists from all over the country marching on Islamabad after June 10.

It is a measure of the prevailing crisis that a stand-in finance minister, Naveed Qamar, will present the new government’s first budget at a critical time because Ishaq Dar, who held the portfolio in the cabinet formed on March 30, walked away with eight other ministers of his main coalition partner Pakistan Muslim League-N last month, after a deadline for reinstating the judges passed unmet.

The session, opening at 5pm, will be keenly watched for how the government will seek to balance its budget and tackle people’s hardships such as those emanating from rocketing food and fuel prices, food and power shortages – all of which are blamed on more than eight years of President Pervez Musharraf’s government.

But the budget debate will likely be overshadowed by political issues like the future of the president, the judicial crisis created by his controversial Nov 3, 2007, emergency proclamation and a PPP-proposed constitutional amendment package mainly seeking to restore the powers of parliament and the prime minister.

The Senate has also been called for its budget session from Wednesday and will be at hand if the government decides to convene a joint session of the two houses of parliament to pass a promised resolution for the reinstatement of the judges and thus avoid a standoff with the lawyers, or even to get the president out of the way by impeaching him for his alleged violations of the constitution such as his Oct 12, 1999 coup as army chief that toppled then prime minister Nawaz Sharif and the extra-constitutional Nov 3 emergency.

But, despite last week’s wave of rumours about the president, which were lapped up by an eager electronic media and caused huge losses on the stock market, there was no concrete sign yet of the coalition seeking an impeachment – for which it can muster the required two-thirds majority in a joint session of parliament – or even bringing a resolution on the judges.

The PPP leadership is instead touting a package, which seems good for a transition to a genuine parliamentary democracy but for which it does not have the required two-thirds majorities separately in both houses of parliament until President Musharraf is deserted by enough of his loyalists now forming a majority in the 100-seat Senate.

The PML-N continues to provide the crucial support to the PPP-led government in parliament even after withdrawing from the cabinet, but the budget session is likely to indicate how far the two main political parties can travel together without resolving their differences on ways to restore the judges.