THE race for the Senate chairman and deputy chairman has reached an interesting stage. With the election due on March 12, and a handful of votes separating the government and the opposition in the upper house after the latest election, campaigning is at full swing. The incumbent chairman Sadiq Sanjrani, re-nominated by the ruling coalition, is six votes behind his rival from the opposition Yousuf Raza Gilani but since the election will be held through a secret ballot, the government appears confident Mr Sanjrani will scrape through to victory. The opposition coalition has 53 members to the government’s 47. However, one PML-N senator, former finance minister Ishaq Dar, has not taken an oath since he left the country, so the opposition has a lead of five votes.

On Tuesday, events took a strange turn when Defence Minister Pervez Khattak told the media that they had offered to nominate JUI-F’s Maulana Ghafoor Haideri as their candidate for the post of deputy chairman. This was a shock offer because JUI-F leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman is leading the opposition campaign against the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan and the two have been exchanging personal taunts for years now. The surreal offer symbolises the extent to which parties are willing to go to snatch victory in this closely fought contest. Maulana Haideri refuted the offer subsequently but the fact remains that in this high-stakes game, everything appears kosher for the contestants. The ruling party, however, will have a lot to answer if its candidate wins despite trailing in numbers. The entire edifice of the PTI’s protest against the victory of Mr Gilani on the Islamabad seat for the Senate is built around the fact that the opposition did not have the required numbers, just like the government does not in the Senate today. The logic peddled by the PTI is that since Mr Gilani did not have the requisite vote count as per party positions, the votes that propelled him to victory were a product of corruption. This same logic will apply if Mr Sanjrani were to win. The PTI government needs to be ready to answer these questions, or see its narrative get degraded in the court of public opinion. In either case, it is important that these issues are addressed once the Senate elections are over. The political pollution witnessed in the past few weeks can only be cleansed through comprehensive electoral reforms.

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2021