Information Minister Attaullah Tarar’s disclosure that the federal government had decided to move for the banning of the PTI as well as the trial of Imran Khan, former President Arif Alvi and former National Assembly Deputy Speaker Qasim Suri for high must be seen as a response to the recent Supreme Court decision on reserved seats, which restored the PTI as a parliamentary party as a consequence. That seems to have been quite a leisurely pace of making up one’s mind, because all the events which make up the subject matter of the charges, what the lawyers call the res, are old. It is quite likely, given the PTI’s track record, that it will launch a series of legal challenges to these charges. Without going into the merits of either challenges or the defences, it must not be forgotten that they will be adjudicated by the same Supreme Court which took the decision about the reserved seats.
The move is intended to bring about stability. The Prime Minister is reported to have expressed the view that political stability cannot be achieved while the PTI is around. That be as may be, it remains a matter of opinion. That is something the PM will naturally believe, along with the rest of his party, but there will be a large number of PTI supporters who will vociferously defend the party against the charges made against it. Instead of simply deciding whether the PTI should be banned or not, the government has opened the debate up, as the Supreme Court will be forced to consider whether or not any party can be banned at all. It is worth noting that the high treason trial may depend on the remarks made in the Supreme Court’s detailed judgement on the dissolution, but the constitution of the trial court will depend on the federal government, which may find that one of the first things it will have to explain is the time it had allowed to elapse between the Supreme Court judgement and the initiation of the trial.
If cooperation from the judiciary had been assured, then these problems would be easily overcome, but as the reserved seats judgement shows, such cooperation will depend on convincing judges that the legal course is what the government says it is. The government should ensure that in tackling the political problem of the PTI, it should follow a political course of action.
