It’s a fine mess the army and its friends have thrown up in Pakistan. An election which many thought would propel Mian Nawaz Sharif to office, though not to power, as the country’s prime minister for the fourth time has now been riddled with holes. Neither Sharif’s Muslim League nor the Pakistan People’s Party of the Bhutto-Zardaris has obtained the number of seats that would make it the ruling party. It has been made very clear in the days since the election that Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, its candidates taking part in the vote as independents, has come by a clear majority in the national assembly.
That has been the biggest surprise of all. The army, commonly referred to as the establishment, bent over backwards to destroy the PTI following the violence of May 9 last year. In the run-up to the February 8 election, the military had the judiciary impose as many as three punishing judgements on Imran Khan in the hope that his future would now belong to his past and that his adherents would have no more opportunities in Pakistan’s volatile politics. The ludicrous part of the military’s operations against the PTI leader is that the soldiers did not hold themselves back from interfering in Khan’s marriage. That the issue of iddat is really an issue for Muslim ulema to decide did not matter.
And now all this chicanery and intrigue have hit the military and its political loyalists hard. That the election was rigged, that the seats won by the PTI were, in the long hours of the vote count following the close of the election, were handed over to its rivals are a sordid picture which now has Pakistanis outraged. The PTI’s Gohar Ali Khan has made it known that the party won as many as 180 seats, more than enough to have it form the next government in Pakistan. But he also noted that most of these seats, as many as 85, were carefully and surreptitiously taken away from the PTI with the ulterior motive of benefiting its rivals.
And that is not all. An individual elected from Karachi has voluntarily renounced his seat, arguing that he had not won the election and that rigging gave him the seat. That was a refreshing act of morality on the part of a politician who is unwilling to be part of a process based on electoral fraudulence. In Karachi, the Jamaat-e-Islami saw its fortunes decline, with the Muttahida Qaumi Mahaz (MQM) given as many as 18 seats -- seats over which its triumph is questionable. In simple terms, the military and the Election Commission of Pakistan have engineered a situation that would prevent the PTI from taking centre stage. The millions of PTI followers have, however, by making their way to the polling centres in droves, made their choice clear.
But the drama does not end there. Maulana Fazlur Rahman, chief of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-Islam (F), an ally of the Muslim League and the PPP in creating the conditions that forced Imran Khan’s government from power in April 2022, came forth the other day with the revelation that it was on the instructions of then army chief Qamar Bajwa and another general that the move against the PTI was undertaken. The Maulana’s statement has led to a flurry of comments in Pakistan, with his erstwhile allies in the Muslim League and the People’s Party rounding on him and denying that any such manoeuvring took place to remove Khan from office. To add to the mess, Fazlur Rahman, whose party has lost badly, has claimed that the February 8 election had been a rigged process.
The upshot of it all is that more than a fortnight after the election Pakistan’s political parties have failed to cobble a government into shape. The ambitious Nawaz Sharif, having delivered a premature victory speech when it was clear the Independents/PTI people were on a winning streak, has abandoned his claim to prime ministerial office, which place he now wants his brother Shehbaz Sharif to occupy. In the course of the election campaign, the People’s Party made public its intention of seeing the young Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari as prime minister. Both the PML and the PPP traded barbs on the campaign trail.
The two parties, confronted post-election with the PTI phenomenon, have been trying to work out a deal that would have the prime minister’s office rotate between them over the next five years. The Bhutto-Zardaris, including Asif Zardari, are willing to support the PML take charge of the government but are unwilling to be part of any coalition, preferring instead to support the Sharifs from outside. That has not gone down well with the Muslim League. With their egos deflated post-election, the two parties are now up against the spectre of a PTI returning to office.
But it will not be a cakewalk for the PTI. Its demand that the seats stolen from it, seats which were maliciously given to the PML and the PPP, be restored to it has seen politics heat up in Pakistan. The one hurdle in the way of a PTI restoration is the army, which has patently been caught in its act of engineering the results of the vote. Within Pakistan, political leaders and analysts have of late been making analogies with the elections of December 1970, when the army not only prevented a victorious Awami League from assuming power in Islamabad but initiated a genocide in the country’s eastern province that led to a dismemberment of Pakistan.
The immediate future for politics in Pakistan remains uncertain. The PTI, despite the overtures made by the military to it on the possibilities of a compromise solution to the crisis (senior army figures have reportedly been meeting Imran Khan in Adiala jail), is unwilling to have anything to do with the PML and the PML. It is in buoyant mood and is not ready to accept anything other than a correction of the election results and its assumption of office as the party of government in Islamabad.
In men like Gohar Ali Khan, Ali Amin Gandapur and Ali Mohammad Khan, the PTI has the spokesmen whose firmness in articulating its position has injected confidence in PTI supporters all over the country. Imran Khan’s nomination of Omar Ayub Khan, a grandson of Pakistan’s first military dictator Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, as the PTI’s candidate for prime minister, is reflective of the party’s newfound confidence in itself.
The circumstances in Pakistan raise once again, beyond and above everything, the disruptive role the country’s army continues to play in its politics. When voting ended on February 8, General Asim Munir congratulated the people of Pakistan on taking part in the election. That was not his remit since the army is one of the many institutions in the country and lawfully expected to work under the government. But his statement was demonstrative once again of the long shadow the soldiers have cast on politics since Iskandar Mirza and Ayub Khan plunged Pakistan into ages-long political darkness through the coup d’etat of October 1958.
The election has been a mess because the aim of the establishment was to place its loyalist politicians in office. That strategy has backfired. It will now be for Pakistan’s army, its judiciary and its election machinery to put things right. Or the army chief, the chief justice and the chief election commissioner should resign or be asked to go. After the allegations of rigging made by a whistleblower, in this instance the divisional commissioner of Rawalpindi, all of these men have lost face.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Consultant Ediotr, Dhaka Tribune.
