AFTER facing the disappointment of an unfriendly judicial commission verdict, the PTI can now draw comfort through a couple of favourable decisions from the much-maligned election tribunals. In both cases, the winning candidates — including the speaker of the National Assembly — stand de-seated, while irregularities proven through judicial investigation mandate a re-poll within 60 days. Naturally, this is contingent on whether the de-seated candidates choose to invoke their legal right of appeal in the Supreme Court, and obtain a stay order against the tribunal verdicts.
Contrary to what some may think, challenging a tribunal’s decision in the apex court is neither illegal nor an elaborate conspiracy of any kind. Right of appeal is standard judicial practice in all civilised societies, and has been used liberally by members of all parties to contest tribunal decisions in the past. While the railways minister from PML-N was the most recent high-profile beneficiary of an appeal, others retaining their legislature memberships on Supreme Court-issued stay orders include PTI MNAs Qaiser Jamal, Rai Hassan Nawaz, and Ghulam Sarwar from Fata, Sahiwal, and Rawalpindi respectively.
At the time of writing, however, statements by party leaders indicate that the PML-N appears to be heading towards a rematch in the constituencies, rather than a way out through the Supreme Court. Any such move, while appearing to be bold and thoroughly ‘political’, may end up going either way.
Challenging a tribunal’s decision in the apex court is neither illegal nor an elaborate conspiracy.
More broadly, these tribunal decisions carry with them certain implications for the supporters and leaders of the two parties, and for the political landscape of the province in general. For starters, some have taken the verdicts as an indictment of the electoral process, an indictment of the judicial commission’s conclusions, and clear proof of the PML-N’s systemic attempts to rig the 2013 elections.
These conclusions are only partially correct. On the first count, the indictment of our electoral process is loud and clear. The actual management of an election, especially at the constituency level, is terrible, and as these investigations have proven, riddled with irregularities. The performance and capacity of the polling staff and those providing oversight is, quite clearly, very poor. The worst part is that this hasn’t changed in nearly four decades of electioneering, and doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.
In any electoral system chock full of loopholes, such as ours, the space for malign purpose and illegal practices is much larger. Thus to dismiss irregularities as simple outputs of bureaucratic incompetence is akin to brushing over the very real acts of coercion, intentional malpractice, and collusion that do happen across the country. These have been documented a number of times in previous elections as well.
On the second charge — that pertaining to the judicial commission’s verdict — the situation is less clear, and perhaps one of semantics deployed by the aggrieved party. In its submission to the JC, the PTI alleged a large-scale, nationwide conspiracy to steal an election. The terms of reference subsequently drafted were meant to investigate this and its accompanying allegations. One can argue that the overwhelming burden of proof imposed by such lofty allegations was always going to make a favourable verdict an improbability (if not an outright impossibility).
In the hindsight afforded by the judgement of these two tribunals, a better starting point may have been alleging an unfair election on the basis of mass irregularities and administrative incompetence. These have been far easier to prove, and they retain, to some extent, the same logic of fairness underlying the earlier charge of mass rigging.
If the irregularities — inadvertent or those born out of malign intent — rob a voter of his or her right to a free vote, or impact the representation entrusted to one candidate by a segment of the constituency, the election deserves to be called into question. This rather basic tenet should be the bar set for electoral exercises in Pakistan, with the eventual aim of attaining it in some iterative fashion over the long run.
So what now for the two constantly warring parties? The PTI may take this as a shot in the arm, just in time for Punjab’s local government elections. The toothless law developed by the PML-N government may make the entire exercise superficial, but it nonetheless provides an important institutional opening for an opposition so heavily marginalised in the provincial assembly. Capitalising on it, however, would require a resolution of intra-party squabbles, and mass reorganisation at the union council level
For the PML-N, the situation is optically embarrassing. The actual text of the verdicts may point towards ECP-handled irregularities rather than rigging, but at this point, legalese is pretty much irrelevant. There was a narrative spun around their election victory that placed them on shaky ground, and these two decisions will further help instil societal scepticism. Luckily for them, their style of politics doesn’t rely on mass-populism or on moral concerns to a great degree. Their core voters are generally ‘sticky’, embedded in local patronage structures, and unlikely to opt out because of a couple of tribunal decisions. The fringe voters, however, may see the party in a different, less favourable light (though that also goes for those on the PTI fringe following their dharna shenanigans).
Finally, the political landscape in Punjab may see further fracturing along the lines of elites representing PTI and PML-N. Finding common ground in causes that may even be mutually beneficial (such as on the issue of bank transaction taxes) will be ever more difficult, and this deep-seated acrimony will continue to grow all the way till the next election. At this point, that next election in Punjab promises to be much closer than the last one was in 2013.
The writer teaches politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.
Twitter: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, August 31st, 2015
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