AT PENPOINT
Perhaps the only fly in the ointment for the PTI has been that while the Supreme Court has restored its existence as a parliamentary party, it has not done anything to restore to founder Imran Khan the Prime Ministership. The existence of a PTI parliamentary party while Imran is in jail is a little like the proverbial boiled egg without salt, for the purpose of the PTI is to see Imran PM. That democracy is restored, defended, or left entirely alone, is not the concern of the PTI, or indeed of any political party.
The real collision is about to take place. As the judiciary takes apart the various means by which Imran was ousted from office, the PTI broken, and the election result twisted, there is an ominous silence about the events of 9 May 2023, when the response to the first arrest of Imran Khan was a series of attacks on Army installations, including GHQ and Corps Commander House Lahore. As Imran finds the cases against him being overturned, he is now in jail solely on remand in a NAB Toshakhana case, He has been arrested in the 9 May 2023 cases, for which he will require bail.
He seems to be bumping up against a red line, for another symbol of PTI villany, Sanam Javed, has been rearrested in a fresh case. Those who have refused to forget, have apparently refused to let go. The refusal of remand in that case, was followed by arrest in an Islamabad case. The Islamabad High Court ordered her release, and forbade her arrest in any fresh case. Clearly, those efforts to keep her behind bars were taken to the last extent.
She has become too important a symbol to be let go with a display of sportsman’s spirit. As Imran probably knows, sports is like war, and there are usually no prisoners taken. During the 29th century, after England had propagated sports all around the world, but especially to Europe and the USA, there developed the ethos of the sportsman’s spirit, which was also the spirit of the amateur, who was supposed to be more concerned with how the game was played, race run or shot-put thrown, rather than the actual result. This spirit extended to politics, where results were supposed to be accepted.
One could say that the professionalization of sports has extended to politics, with the amateur ethos replaced by a winning-is-everything spirit. The feeling that sports has replaced war owes itself to the Cold War, when the USA and USSR made the quadrennial Olympics a clash that they stopped from being armed. Within that rivalry was the Indo-Pakistan hockey rivalry which lasted until the apparently irretrievable decline of Pakistani hockey. However, that rivalry is now played out in cricket, and though the Indian government has stopped bilateral meetings, the occasional encounter in multilateral tournaments keeps the rivalry alive.
At one level, the reserved seats are irrelevant. So long as Imran is not PM, or at least not in the National Assembly, who holds those seats will not appear relevant to the true believer.
The PTI is being subjected to what it itself has done: refused to accept results. The Supreme Court actually was asked to resolve one of the blind spots of the Constitution. It allows for independents, but with the provisions providing for allocation of reserved seats, it assumes party allocation. The incentive for independents to join a party is that if they do not join a party, they will lose their input into those seats.
It should be noted that the allocation must be made according to a list of candidates who have filed nomination papers at the same time as the candidates for the various constituencies. The Returning Officers for reserved seats are the provincial election commissioners. The women’s seats are distributed to the various provinces, with the result that the allocations reflect the results of the parties in the general constituencies.
Now the PTI has not been able to file a list of women nominees, because it was banned, and nor has the Sunni Ittehad Council, which the PTI-backed independents later joined. A problem arose because the National Assembly’s ratio of seats was changed, to the extent that seating members by the allocations made according to the ECP, excluding those independents, would have given the government a two-thirds majority, which would have allowed it to amend the Constitution, as cobbling together the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate was well on the cards.
The Supreme Court relied on the affiliation declared in the nomination forms, though that does not allow the nominee to claim the party symbol; that is only possible when the authorized party officebearer issues the so-called ‘ticket; which is actually a letter from that officebearer to the constituency returning officer, asking to issue the party symbol to the person in question.
It may have happened that a candidate had declared for a particular party, but then presented a ticket issued by another, but such blatant floorcrossing is avoided by leaving the particular
entry blank on the nomination form. The returning officer finally allots symbols to all candidates; giving party symbols to all those presenting tickets, and others to all remaining candidates. As a result, candidates who declared a party affiliation may well contest as independents.
In many cases, candidates allotted the ticket in one constituency may not bother withdrawing from other seats, leading to those risible results where a prominent politician obtains only a few votes in a constituency where he did not campaign. Then there are those candidates who run as independents against the party ticket-holder, often in an attempt to prove the party wrong. Some usually succeed at every election.
What the Supreme Court has done is take the independents elected, and constitute a PTI parliamentary party from among the 34 of them who entered their political affiliation as PTI in their forms. All those elected as independents would be free to join it, and reserved seats would be allocated accordingly.
The Supreme Court in its wisdom is according importance to party affiliation, but that might be a case of applying Westminster standard to a decidedly non-Westminster style of politics. Parties are not very coherent or rigid even in Westminster, but in Pakistan, their primary function has been to act as vehicles for their leaders’ political ambitions. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto presented himself and the PPP with a well-defined ideology. Mian Nawaz Sharif and the PML(N) presented another alternative. Both presented certain persons as indispensable to the ideology. The PTI dispensed with ideology, focusing instead on Imran as indispensable.
The problem with the Supreme Court ruling is that it does not free Imran, nor bring him closer to the National Assembly, whose task would be to anoint as PM. He and his legal team have made incremental progress, having got rid of virtually all the cases against him except two NAB references, and the really big one, the May 9 cases. However, it now seems those cases are being saved as a last resort which is now being exercised.
At one level, the reserved seats are irrelevant. So long as Imran is not PM, or at least not in the National Assembly, who holds those seats will not appear relevant to the true believer.
