EDITORIAL: For PTI’s (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s) political committee to say that “chief election commissioner has crossed all limits of dishonesty and partiality” is understandable, even if it is in typically bad taste, given how the political temperature is pushing the party to lash out at anything and everything that does not completely agree with its narrative.
But the decision to hold countrywide protests outside ECP (Election Commission of Pakistan) offices and demand the resignation of the CEC (Chief Election Commissioner) still makes very little sense; if any at all.
For public consumption, at least, the party’s upset that the Commission still hasn’t denotified legislative memberships of dissident PTI lawmakers, which only added to the unpleasantness caused by the disagreements over i-voting and EVM (Electronic Voting Machines), yet everybody knows that the real issue is the foreign funding case.
Slowly but surely, it is tightening around the party’s neck like a noose. And if the writing on the wall is anything to go by, there’s more than an outside chance of the verdict going against PTI, possibly even leading to its dissolution and eventual disqualification of a number of its office bearers, including Chairman Imran Khan.
The decision to leave all else aside and go after ECP in a hurry was no doubt prompted by the Islamabad High Court’s (IHC’s) order last week to wrap up the foreign funding case within 30 days. But now that the honourable court has suspended its earlier order, perhaps PTI’s trigger-happy strategic planners and spokespersons will breathe easy for a little while.
But that does not mean that PTI will not continue to appear out of sorts in the weeks and months to come. Clearly, the party has still not digested that it was clinically, cleanly and very constitutionally removed from power; and its attempts to exaggerate certain facts, from the looks of things so far, and even bend the constitution and fill streets with hundreds of thousands of diehard supporters, did not work and it was still forced to pack up and leave.
Now, on top of the recent setbacks, the foreign funding case might well prove to be the last nail in its coffin; which explains why it is ready to fight tooth and nail against it. Still its actions, rather reactions, become harder to understand by the day.
CEC Sikandar Sultan Raja was PTI’s choice for the slot, after all, and the internet’s already made sure that everybody’s seen Sheikh Rashid’s ringing endorsement of Raja in a letter to PM Imran Khan at the time. Yet now that things are not going the party’s way, it’s started saying that Raja was thrust upon it by the so-called establishment.
And, for some reason, it’s also gone to town on ECP for not conducting timely delimitation of constituencies and delaying early elections, whereas the CEC is on record lamenting that he wrote to the PTI government no less than 15 times about the need to carry out the said exercise yet he never received any reply.
Contrary to increasingly loud speculation, it is sincerely hoped that PTI, especially Imran Khan, has not been so embittered by the events of the last few weeks that they’ve really decided to make sure that nobody will play if they won’t.
Yet going by how openly partisan PTI appointed president and governors have become despite the constitutionally mandated neutrality of their offices, regardless of the cost to the country’s economy, security and/or reputation, nothing can really be ruled out. Nobody ought to need any reminding that the country stands at a very critical crossroads, and the slightest misstep could make it fall over the edge, default on its debt, and perhaps even be rubbished to the dustbin of history forever.
And it’s a shame to see the most senior politicians going out of their way to harm each other and not caring at all how much the country suffers because of it.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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