Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari's party late Friday night denied that he has buckled under intense local and international pressure and decided to lift Governor's rule in Punjab. “This is mere speculation,” presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar told Saudi Gazette by telephone. “Neither will governor's rule be lifted in Punjab nor will the judges be restored.” “The president has decided to fight politically,” Babar said. “The (Pakistan People's) Party executive committee will hold an emergency meeting on Monday and take decisive action.” Babar was reacting to local media reports that Zardari had agreed to lift executive rule in Punjab Province after separate meetings earlier in the day with army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. The meetings were held as police detained hundreds of lawyers and opposition activists in a bid to scuttle a so-called long march that started Thursday from Karachi and Quetta and was scheduled to reach Islamabad on Monday. Local reports said Zardari was given 24 hours to sort out the political crisis, under a deal brokered by the United States and Britain in consultation with the Pakistani Army. Gilani was assigned the task of getting Zardari to accept the deal, the reports said. Under the proposed deal, former Supreme Court chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who was dismissed in 2007 by the then president and army chief Pervez Musharraf, would be reinstated. A presidential aide was quoted as saying that compromise involved setting up a constitutional court and an appellate court, with Chaudhry heading one of them. The political crisis was sparked when Zardari imposed governor's rule in Punjab on Feb. 25 after the Supreme Court barred PML-N leaders Nawaz and brother Shahbaz Sharif from holding elected office. Punjab Governor Salman Taseer was quoted by Geo TV International late Friday as also rejecting the compromise deal. Geo blocked, ‘Sherry quits' Geo International aired Taseer's statements after its news transmission was blocked in some parts of Pakistan, including Karachi, Hyderabad, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Lahore. PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan Muslim League-Q general secretary Mushahid Hussain and Tehreek-i-Insaf chief Imran Khan condemned the blocking of the channel by government regulators. Reports said Information Minister Sherry Rehman resigned due to differences over the government's handling of the media, but Gilani has not accepted her resignation. It remained unclear early Saturday morning whether any deal was reached or was close. But the main opposition leader, Sharif, left the door to reconciliation open. “There is no need for back channel diplomacy or private and secret dialogue. I have not slammed my doors on dialogue,” Sharif said in television interview. “ I have no personal enmity with Zardari. If he shuns vested interest and sincerely fulfills his promises to reinstate judges and restore an independent judiciary, I am ready to cooperate with him,” he told the Geo station. “The government is looking for a face-saving device,” said Mushahid Hussain. “The long march has public support and has united the whole nation, therefore Pakistan's establishment and foreign friends have intervened to find a solution to this crisis,” he said. The government on Friday extended a ban on public gatherings to North West Frontier Province, which borders war-torn Afghanistan, following similar orders in the provinces of Punjab and Sindh. Intelligence officials said more than 200 people, including prominent lawyers and local opposition party leaders, had been forcibly rounded up or placed under house arrest in North West Frontier Province. Police also stopped one of Pakistan's most iconic lawyers, Ali Ahmed Kurd, the president of the national Supreme Court bar association, from entering Sindh en route to join marchers hoping to head for Islamabad. Hundreds of demonstrators have been rounded up since Wednesday and police baton-charged protesters in the southern city of Karachi, Thursday. The United States is seeking to set to rest fears of a military coup on the lines of Musharraf's overthrow of the Sharif government in 1999. Chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Admiral Michael Mullen said there is not a “high probability right now” of a military takeover, though he had tried to calm Kayani quite a number of times when the army chief reportedly expressed anger over the way Pakistan's political establishment was behaving. “I have had upwards of 10 interactions with Kayani. He wants to do the right thing for Pakistan. But he is in a very tough spot,” Mullen told a TV channel. Kayani is “committed to a civilian government”, he added.
