POLITICAL uncertainty in Punjab deepened further on Saturday after a tweet by President Arif Alvi quashed reports that he was sending Senate chairman Sadiq Sanjrani to Lahore for swearing in Hamza Shehbaz as new chief minister a week after his election in a chaotic assembly session. The tweet says a summary received by him from the Prime Minister’s Office regarding a court order asking him to nominate a representative to administer the oath to the chief minister-elect, was under his consideration “as per the Constitution”. This suggests that he is in no mood to break the deadlock caused by the new Punjab governor’s refusal to accept the ‘legality’ of Hamza Shehbaz’s election to the top office. Governor Omer Sarfraz Cheema, who conveniently checked himself into a hospital earlier in the day, is delaying the oath-taking of the PML-N leader on one pretext or the other, despite an earlier Lahore High Court ruling that he was not “fulfilling his constitutional duty” because a “governor cannot refuse to administer oath”. Consequently, Pakistan’s most populous province has remained without a chief executive for over three weeks, and crucial decisions are being delayed at the expense of its 110m citizens because the people holding constitutional offices in Islamabad and Lahore have chosen to pursue party instructions, instead of following the law of the land.

Apparently, the president and governor are trying to buy some time for their party, which is waiting for the ECP to decide a reference seeking the disqualification of 26 PTI lawmakers who had voted for Hamza Shehbaz against their party nominee Parvez Elahi for the post. But sooner or later, they will have to follow the Constitution — willingly or unwillingly. Their deliberate disregard for the Constitution will, however, go down in the annals of Pakistan’s chequered political history as a black spot. The political crisis spawned by one illegal action after the other by the PTI and its ally PML-Q, in their bid to cling to power by hook or by crook in Punjab, is unprecedented. The way the two parties had tried to initially delay the election of the chief minister, and later the violence they inflicted on the deputy speaker and their opponents on the day of the election, was enough to expose their disrespect towards democracy. And now the tactics they are using to delay the oath-taking is further damaging whatever democratic credentials they are left with. But they don’t seem to care.

Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2022