Is it Pakistan’s spring?

Pakistan voters have delivered a message to people aspiring for democracy everywhere

Alok Tiwari

The conventional wisdom in Pakistan is that no matter who wins the elections, it is the generals who are in charge. Often it is official when the army takes over through a coup. At other times, they are de facto rulers while nominally having a civilian government. It is allowed some leeway but cannot do anything that the generals strongly disapprove. In the past, no prime minister has ever lasted by defying the army. This was set to continue even after the latest elections held last week and whose results are still coming in.

The generals had it all planned. Ousted prime minister Imran Khan, who had openly turned against the army in the latter part of his term, was in jail. For good measure, the courts convicted him on couple of counts just before elections handing him long prison sentences. The army had pressured most of the important leaders of his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party to desert him. Some quit the party, some quit politics itself. Those who did not fall in line were arrested on various charges. The party was denied even an election symbol, a major setback in the subcontinent where parties are known from their symbols.

Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz’s (PML-N) Nawaz Sharif was brought back from exile and honourably reinstated. The cases against him were given a quiet burial. The entire state machinery was used for his party’s benefit. The Election Commission was geared up to do the ‘right’ thing. Everything was done to ensure Khan spent rest of his days in jail and Sharif took over as new puppet of the army. Only they needed to go through the motions of voting and then anointing him. Or so the generals thought. The voters of Pakistan, though, had other ideas.

Despite all the overt and covert measures of the Army and the establishment, the voters turned out in big numbers. To everybody’s surprise, including possibly, PTI and Khan himself, his party emerged as the single largest. At last count, it’s affiliates had secured 95 seats in the 265-seat National Assembly. Though well short of majority to form the government (133 being the magic number). There are 45 others who were not aligned with either Sharif’s PML-N or Bilawal Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) who could theoretically lend support to PTI affiliates and help it form government.

But Pakistan would not be Pakistan if popular will were allowed to prevail. So, a PTI government is still a long shot. There are various other measures that the establishment could still take to deny them. Imran Khan remains in the jail and there is no leader of any stature who would work to gather allies or even to keep the flock together. Big power and money in Pakistan will do everything in their power to have their way. Poaching of lawmakers by the powerful side is an old subcontinental disease. Pakistan is not immune to it. It may well happen that as the days wear on, the count of 95 that PTI affiliates have will decline.

There are 70 seats that are to be allocated to parties based on vote share. Since PTI isn’t a recognized political party anymore, it will get no share and seats will bizarrely be distributed among others artificially boosting their count. This way, a new government may have numbers stacked behind it, but it will be shorn of all legitimacy.

The latest is that PML-N and PPP are coming together to stitch up a coalition. With little nudges from the Army, they may well succeed. Pakistan will return to its normal of having a military-controlled civilian government. Allah will be in his heaven and all will be well with the world. Yet, the election results have shown it may not be business as usual this time.

Though the generals may hold on to levers of power they will have to deal with the mood of the nation that has decided spoken out against them. Had this election been carried out in free and fair manner, this might well have been Pakistan’s 1977 moment when India threw out an autocratic and deeply unpopular government. Yet, even though battered, bruised, and in tatters the election has given a verdict that should be deeply disturbing to the powers that be. If a government is formed by excluding the PTI, it will always have to contend with the fact that the popular will was against it. If any concessions are made to PTI, it will amount to conceding defeat by the establishment and that it will be loath to do.

Any which way you look at it, Imran Khan is the winner. Already protests are breaking out across the country against the alleged rigging of the elections and against various other ways in which PTI and its supporters were prevented from winning. It may be premature to call it a Pakistani spring, but it has already achieved more than the “Arab spring” uprisings that broke out on the streets of several Arab countries some years back.

Pakistani voters have delivered a message to people aspiring for democracy everywhere. It is that no matter how clever the autocrats think they have been, no matter how meticulous their planning, no matter how compromised the elections process they set up, no matter the many unethical and underhand means they deploy to direct the outcome of democratic process, it will all be thwarted in face of popular will. The good part is all autocrats feel compelled to face elections sooner or later to attain some level of legitimacy. If people are united and determined, the elections can become an opportunity to deliver the autocrat a blow. Kudos to people of Pakistan for showing the way.

This column appeared in Lokmat Times on Feb 14, 2024