An (in)credible election!

The 2024 elections have aroused a perfect storm of allegations of gerrymandering, rigging and manipulation of results. Most people, including well-informed commentators, seem at a loss though to offer a coherent, convincing explanation of this conundrum. This writer claims no special knowledge either, so the following arguments may appear convincing to some, in the realm of the speculative to others. These are the wages of venturing into unknown, slippery territory.

Let us examine a possible scenario to explain what the ‘plan’ for the 2024 elections may have been. The repression let loose against the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and its leaders, particularly Imran Khan, had already dented the credibility of the polls long before even a single ballot had been cast.

How then to explain the PTI’s winning around 100 seats in the National Assembly (NA)? This irrespective of the fact that the party has been claiming it won more, and that some 80-85 seats were stolen from it.

It should be kept in mind that the PTI was fighting the election with one hand tied behind its back, a consequence of being denied its electoral symbol of ‘bat’, a circumstance considered crucial amongst a largely illiterate voting populace that identifies its preferred party through such electoral symbols.

However, a qualification can be made to this accepted wisdom by the fact that the PTI’s vote bank (and arguably its leadership) belongs to an urban elite and middle class demographic. The PTI candidates were all contesting as Independents, requiring either familiarity of the voters with them, or extraordinary campaign efforts to establish the identity of particular PTI-backed Independents.

Since neither of these was visible, the only other logical explanation is that factors beyond the local, i.e. national, were the not-so-hidden persuaders. The vote for the PTI, controversies notwithstanding, suggests a turn against the well-established penchant of our establishment to bend its back in every electoral contest in living memory in favour of the ‘desired’ result.

If it may be assumed, and there are sufficient arguments to bolster this assertion, that the ubiquitous establishment was determined not to let the PTI back into power, how is even the ‘conceded’ tally of 100 plus seats to be explained.

In this scribbler’s humble opinion, this was an effort to overcome the perception beforehand that we were heading into an unfair, unfree election. The tally of 100 seats was meant to bolster the credentials of an (in)credible election as free and fair.

The fact that it does not appear to have succeeded, given the almost universal uproar from all quarters about the legitimacy of the polls, has less to do with the intentions of the authors of the plan and more to do with their failure to correctly judge the mood prevailing in the country.

While the gambit of conceding 100 plus seats to the PTI may have failed, the other half of the plan is also interesting. Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) was left dangling short of even a simple majority, forcing it to seek a coalition alliance with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and other smaller parties to cobble together sufficient numbers in the NA to form a government.

This has afforded the PPP the opening to exact more than its pound of flesh. Not only is it mooting Asif Ali Zardari to return as President, it also wants the post of Speaker, preferably of the NA, ministries in the Punjab government to be led by Maryam Nawaz Sharif as Chief Minister (CM), a PPP-led coalition government in Balochistan (led by worthy Sarfraz Bugti, a lately embraced ‘member’) and, of course, its government in Sindh, where it enjoys as usual a more than comfortable majority.

Nawaz Sharif has revealed his discomfort at heading such a disparate, weak coalition government in the Centre. He has therefore ‘sacrificed’ his desire to return as Prime Minister (PM) for the fourth time, preferring instead to dump the vale of woes the office is likely to prove in the lap of brother Shehbaz Sharif.

This absolves Nawaz Sharif of any responsibility of the possible failure of the government to deal with the veritable mountain of problems the regime is bound to face, central to which is the state of the economy and the expected ‘blessings’ of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to squeeze the already labouring life of the people out of their wretched bodies and more and more wretched existence.

Moving Shehbaz Sharif back into the PM’s chair also serves the purpose of clearing the path for the entry into high office of Maryam Nawaz Sharif, following in the footsteps of the trajectory of her father’s political career. The whole show, however, whether in the Centre or Punjab, will be run benignly by Nawaz Sharif behind the screen, a novel experience for a country not short of novel experiences in its past.

Whoever the masterminds of the ‘plan’ for elections 2024 were, they could either be reduced to navel-gazing in embarrassment at the outcome, or rubbing their hands with glee at its success. The first could be induced by the universal rejection of the elections and their unbelievable results (with the prospective ruling coalition embarrassedly making efforts to defend it but succeeding only in confirming public perception of their lately-found role as establishment satraps).

The second is more ominous, suggesting as it does the deliberate introduction of political instability as a handle to manipulate things from behind the curtain in favour of whatever the establishment’s goals may be and away from a credible democratic system, something the country has been yearning for but denied since its birth. In either case, a bigger crisis awaits just down the road, whose outline is reasonably clear, but whose consequences remain so far in the realm of conjecture.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024