IT was grave news to finish a dour day. The Supreme Court late Saturday upheld the Election Commission’s deeply controversial decision to take the bat from the PTI. It is a judgment that already seems unlikely to be looked upon favourably in history.

Just days after it overturned a past Supreme Court ruling on lifetime disqualification under Article 62(1)(f) on the grounds that the bench that previously decided the matter had ‘read into the Constitution’ to conjure up a punishment that never existed, a three-member bench of the apex court under the incumbent chief justice seemingly endorsed a very similar transgression by the ECP.

Despite there being no explicit provision in the election rulebook which gives the ECP power to deny a political party its election symbol on the basis of a contested intraparty election, the ECP had gone ahead and done just that. Now, it can rest easy knowing it has the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval.

Given the implications of the punishment imposed on the PTI, that too mere weeks before a general election is due to take place, most legal observers following the proceedings in the Supreme Court had agreed that for the top court to endorse the ECP decision would be tantamount to denying the public their constitutional right to vote for the parties and political leaders of their choice.

What the Supreme Court made of this line of reasoning will be clearer once the detailed order of the court is available to be perused in detail. Meanwhile, word will spread today: one of the most popular parties in the country has been knocked out of the elections by the Supreme Court based on a technicality.

It will not be easy for the PTI support base to come to terms with the move. One also wonders what the general impact of this decision will be on how ‘free and fair’ the upcoming elections are publicly perceived to be.

It must be said that it was remarkable to observe the attention and importance given to the minutiae of the PTI’s constitution during the hearing of this case. One wonders if the country would have been where it has been dragged to had the Election Commission given as much thought and consideration to the Constitution of Pakistan, whose explicit guidelines regarding the democratic process have been violated by it with such casual disregard on multiple occasions in the past year.

Lastly, one must also apportion some of the blame to the PTI’s lawyers in the case, most of whom remained unable to argue the party’s case effectively and succinctly before the court. At the moment, however, that seems beside the point. The party has bigger problems to ponder. Will it be able to survive this setback?

Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2024