To bat or not

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on Friday declared the PTI ineligible to obtain its election symbol of the [cricket] ‘bat’ after it failed to hold intraparty polls as per its constitution, and the Election Act and Election Rules. Announcing its reserved verdict, a five-member ECP bench declared the PTI’s intraparty elections unlawful after its intra-party elections were challenged by over a dozen complainants, including PTI’s founder member Akbar S Babar.

To many observers, this move was not unexpected. They had pointed out how the PTI’s intraparty elections had loopholes and provided enough grounds to the ECP to de-list it and/or take back its election symbol.

As justification, this point of view says that no party can be above the law and when the PTI knew it was ‘out of favour’, it should have made doubly sure that its intraparty elections were foolproof and could not be challenged. Unfortunately for the PTI, the haphazard manner in which the intraparty elections took place gave ample room for them to be challenged in the ECP.

The PTI’s now ‘former’ chairman Barrister Gohar Khan has announced that his party will challenge the ECP’s recent decision either in the Peshawar High Court (PHC) or the Supreme Court (SC) on December 26. Other leaders have said they may challenge the ECP’s decision in the Islamabad High Court. Barrister Gohar sees a conspiracy behind the ECP’s recent order and said that this is aimed at depriving the party of the 227 reserved seats in the country’s national and provincial assemblies. Both legal and political experts are of the opinion that the only way the PTI has a chance of getting its electoral symbol back is through the courts since there is now not enough time to hold new intraparty elections, some also saying that our election laws in any case do not provide for intraparty elections to be held repeatedly.

What happens now? If the courts restore the election symbol, then the PTI will get a huge relief because otherwise all its candidates would have to be fielded independently and they will be contesting on different election symbols. While the PTI is an expert at using social media and would still be able to let its voters know which PTI candidate has which election symbol in his/her constituency, an election symbol is the identity of any political party and helps voters to vote for them. If the bat is given to another independent candidate in a constituency where a PTI candidate has some other symbol, it may make things confusing for voters, especially if they are unaware about the PTI candidate’s symbol. Another issue is that since the PTI will not be contesting as a party, it will not get reserved seats. However, the most important issue for the PTI right now is that if its candidates contest independently, they are not bound by party discipline – which basically means that after the elections, they can join any other political party and Article 63A which restricts defections cannot be applied to them. At a time when the PTI is already facing a lot of hurdles in its election campaign, this may turn out to be the most disastrous thing to happen to a party whose voters would vote for a candidate that can then join any other party, or a party that forms the government, be it the PML-N, PPP, IPP or any other. The coming days are ominous for the PTI unless it gets relief from the courts. Given all this, and the optics we are seeing in the runup to the elections, one wonders how anyone can keep a straight face while claiming that everything going on is 'above board'.