As Pakistan prepares to go ahead with its 14th general election on February 8, 2024, the Pakistani Supreme Court’s decision to deny the ‘bat’ symbol to Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik e Insaf (PTI) party on January 13 has cast fresh doubts about its credibility and the absence of a level playing field.
Last held in July 2018, this is not the first time elections have been delayed. After Zia ul Haq’s martial law in 1977, despite assuring ‘elections after 90 days’, the deadline kept getting extended. Neither have they been completely ‘free and fair’, with allegations surfacing every time about irregularities at the polling and counting stages.
There is a clear constitutional violation this time too. Article 51 of the 1973 Constitution stipulates these should be held within 60 days of the last National Assembly (NA) dissolution, which happened in early August 2023. A pretext for delay was provided by the mandatory requirement for delimitation of constituencies. The election schedule was notified finally in December 2023, with the chief justice sternly ordering the chief election commissioner (CEC), Sikander Sultan Raja, to take ‘lame-duck’ President Arif Alvi’s (his five-year term ended in August 2023) approval for the same.
A minor flutter was caused on January 5, 2024, when a Senate resolution was suddenly passed to postpone the elections, on grounds of difficult weather conditions and adverse law and order situations prevailing in parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan. Tabled in a thinly attended session by an Independent Senator, Dilawar Hussain, it was passed by only 12 votes versus 2. Its legal effect remained doubtful as the prescribed quorum of the Senate, one fourth of its total membership of 104 i.e. 26, was absent.
The electorate comprises 128.5 million registered voters, out of a total population of 241.5 mn. The strength of the NA is now 336, comprising 266 general seats. Sixty seats are reserved for women and 10 for non-Muslims. These are allotted to political parties on the basis of proportional representation. The magic numbers for forming the government are 134 and 169, after addition of reserved seats. Of the 266 general seats Punjab has 141, Sindh 61, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 45, Baluchistan 16 and the Federal Capital area of Islamabad 3 seats. Punjab has more seats than the other three provinces combined. The party which controls Punjab controls Pakistan. This is a permanent feature of Pakistan’s political life.
Three main political parties will be in the fray.
The Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz)-PML(N) did well in the past in its main bastion, Punjab, where a supine bureaucracy and biradari (sub-caste) affiliations helped it. While these still remain consequential, thrice Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif seemed rather listless since his return from almost four years’ exile in the UK, obsessing mainly on past injustices against him by the courts and by insinuation, the military establishment. His dilemma has been to search for a counter narrative to offset Imran Khan’s persisting popularity. Nawaz has also to decide who should inherit his mantle, charismatic daughter Maryam or docile brother Shehbaz Sharif, who remains more acceptable to the Army.
The People’s Party of Pakistan (PPP) retains its main political base in Sindh, where it depends on support from rural landlords. It has lesser control in urban areas of Karachi and Hyderabad. After performing creditably as foreign minister in the last coalition, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has been trying hard to enhance his acceptability to the Army as a young, articulate, balanced leader. Choosing to contest from Lahore, he has also tried to wrest back an erstwhile vote bank in Punjab. His father, Asif Zardari, is a more experienced and wily political leader. These two have been playing good cop and bad cop, occasionally criticising past allies. The latter has tried hard to stitch support from motley feudals in Balochistan and South Punjab, with possible stakes to become president again.
The Pakistan Tehrik e Insaf (PTI) has its main stronghold in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), holding government reins there since 2013. It made sizeable inroads in Punjab after Imran was thrown out of power by a vote of no confidence in the NA in April 2022 by launching a narrative of ‘foreign conspiracy’, ‘unfair martyrdom’ and ‘desertion by the military establishment’ as reasons for his ouster. After the Punjab by-elections in 2022, he seemed electorally invincible. In a series of public meetings, senior military officers were disparaged by name. Though later exposed as false, this narrative has been fanned by an army of besotted, young social media trollers, who have now become a headache for Army censors!
Despite several derogatory audio and video disclosures, Imran’s popularity has not been affected by attempts to besmirch his character. Some Pakistani analysts try to explain this phenomenon as a political idea, facing unemployed youth in urban areas especially, that real power in Pakistan continues to lie with the GHQ, not with elected politicians or the Parliament. In Imran’s resurgence, they see their only redemption.
Other smaller parties like the Jamiat UIema e Islam (JuI-F) of Maulana Fazlur Rehman and the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP) have pockets of strength in southern KP & northern Balochistan. The Ishteqam e Pakistan Party (IPP), a faction of the old PTI with sugar baron Jehangir Tareen as its leader, could win a few seats in Punjab, as may Pervez Khattak’s PTI (Parliamentarians) in KP.
There is also the Karachi factor. This time, of Karachi’s 21 seats, the Muhajir Quami Movement (MQM), which had pockets of strength in Greater Karachi in the past, is aiming for 14-15 seats to offset the PTI. Factions led by Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui, Farooq Sattar and Mustafa Kamal’s Pakistan Sarzameen Party (PSP) were herded together under the Army’s none too gentle prodding. However, this ‘union’ has yet to be ‘blessed’ from London by exiled MQM ‘imam’, Altaf Hussain. The Jamaat e Islami (JeI) could also try to build on its strong showing in the local body elections to win back a few of its traditionally held seats.
Electable feudals from southern Punjab usually ‘go with the wind’. This time, the perception in Pakistani political circles initially suggested that the PML(N) was being favoured by the Army. However, with many Independents now in the fray, bets may be hedged as a ‘hung’ parliament or a weak PML(N)-led option emerges.
Army’s compulsions
Army Chief General Asim Munir will seek to ensure that the PTI does not win a majority. In June 2019, he was removed as Director General, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) after a mere eight months on the job, when he complained to PM Imran about corruption by his wife’s relatives and friends. Imran Khan’s entire strategy in the build up to the Army chief’s succession in November 22 focused on making it controversial, in the hope of getting his favourite, Lt Gen Faiz Hameed, Munir’s successor as DG (ISI), to become the new chief. It was Nawaz Sharif who insisted that Munir should succeed General Bajwa.
As Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Munir inherited a divided senior Army leadership. His retirement date as Lieutenant General had to be extended by two days to keep him senior most among contenders. Two of his peers, Lt Generals Azhar Abbas and Faiz Hameed, took premature retirement. Bajwa promoted and posted 12 new Lieutenant Generals just before he retired. Over the next 12 months, Munir has had to bide his time, to slowly get his own officers into plum positions. This included giving an extension to the current DG (ISI), Lt Gen Nadeem Anjum.
After Imran’s arrest from a court in the Toshakhana (Treasury of State gifts chest) case on May 9, 2023, PTI supporters went on a rampage, attacking army installations, ISI offices, smaller air bases and monuments of martyrs country-wide. The chasm between Khan’s die-hard supporters and those who have traditionally venerated the Army as an institution widened.
Imran has been in prison since then, charged in a number of cases. The three main cases relate to the sale of costly watches, obtained from the Toshakhana for disproportionate personal benefit, cipher document misuse, land gift and a spurious trust formation from irregularly transferred funds, seized in the UK from Malik Riaz, a housing estate builder cum wheeler dealer. Imran’s nomination papers for the February 24 election have been finally rejected. He has also been arrested in the May 9 violence case.
Depriving PTI candidates of the ‘bat’ symbol will be a big setback for them. They will now have to run as Independents. This may create confusion on polling day. Additionally, PTI will be ineligible to claim its proportion of reserved seats for women and minorities.
PTI leaders may have tried a deliberate ploy to bring about an army-judiciary confrontation, two of Pakistan’s institutions which have usually worked in consort, but it has not worked.
In the recent past, sympathy of judges belonging to the Lahore, KP and Islamabad high courts as well as in the Supreme Court under previous CJ, Umar Ata Bandial, has been pronouncedly pro-Imran. The new CJ, Qazi Faiz Isa, enjoyed an upright reputation. The tenor of several of his past judgments has been against undue interference by the military establishment in civilian governance. Possibly for this very reason, he had to face a reference filed by the Imran Khan regime in the Supreme Judicial Council in May, 2019, under tacit military instigation. Isa may have an almost equal dislike for Imran Khan’s return to power as the Army chief.
Meanwhile, his main focus has been to heal rifts within a hopelessly divided higher judiciary, an unpalatable bequest left for him by Bandial. Succour on this front has come recently with the resignations of Justices Mazhar Ali Naqvi and Izaz ul Ahsan, who was tipped to succeed him.
However, the bat symbol judgment may have adversely affected his impartial image. Controversy abounds among legal eagles in Pakistan about its long-term implications.
Apart from intensifying trolling against CJ Isa and seeking a larger bench review, PTI’s plan will be to fall back on its social media organisers to correctly advertise the symbols allotted to its candidates left in the fray. Its supporters may still hope for a landslide turnout in PTI’s favour on election day, channelising widespread angst against the military’s ‘political engineering’. The possibility of PTI cadres indulging in sporadic violence on February 8 also cannot be ruled out.
The economic scene remains gloomy. The Pakistani elite, comprising the civil-military gentry – landlords, big businessmen, generals, judges and civil servants – have, over decades, brought the country to this pass, living off international handouts to establish a rent-extraction economy. Pakistan witnessed low savings and investment, low import substitution and subsistence on low tax revenues. Perennial fiscal deficits and high, unproductive defence expenditures perpetuated what has been described as the “Perfect Doom loop” by Professor Atif Mian, well known Pakistani-origin economist at Princeton University, US.
Despite the financial risks involved in bailing out Pakistan, the IMF has released a second tranche of its next loan ($700 mn out of $3 bn). Arduous loan repayments lie ahead. Food inflation persists at around 28%. General Asim Munir’s ‘zeal- driven’ supervision of the Special Investment Council, set up to attract assistance from Pakistan’s old friends in the Islamic world, has not gathered much traction so far.
In this backdrop, the February 8 elections are unlikely to bring stability or reduce political confrontation in Pakistan in the foreseeable future.
Rana Banerji retired as Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat. This article is based on a talk at a Round Table at the National Security College, Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, Australia on Jan 24, 2024.