Almost unnoticed, the government and PTI negotiators arrived at an agreement on the Terms Of Reference for a judicial commission to do what PTI chief Imran Khan had called for: investigate the 2013 elections to find out if they had been rigged to ensure the victory of the PML(N). This was the issue over which Imran had held his sit-in in Islamabad. The commission is to be set up through an ordinance, which is to include the provision that it is to override all laws that may come into conflict with it. It remains to be seen what would happen if any provision of the law was to come into conflict with the Constitution.
It is to be presumed that the PTI parliamentary delegation will return to the National and Punjab Assemblies, from which its members have tendered their resignations, but which have not yet been accepted. However, it is still not clear what will happen if the commission concludes that the 2013 general election was not rigged in anyone’s behalf. There is the understanding that, if the commission says there was rigging in favour of the PML(N), Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif would call fresh elections. However, if the commission decides in favour of the sitting government, will the PTI react with good sportsmanship? It should not be forgotten that Imran Khan has already expressed this fear, to which he proposed that Mian Nawaz resign. There seems nothing to prevent Imran reviving this statement, and saying that his fears had proved true.
Another problem is that the judicial commission does give the result that Imran wants, but the electorate does not. In other words, what happens if the PTI does not win the election? Worse, what if it only wins enough seats to lead to a hung Parliament? Will Imran then enter into a coalition with the PML(N) or the PPP? It should be impossible on paper, because he has hammered home the point ad nauseam, that both mainstream parties are incorrigibly corrupt, and also based on the dynastic principle. However, Imran has engaged in compromises already, most recently by taking part in the Senate elections through MPAs elected in a poll which he doubts so strongly. The PTI has also resolved on a dissolution of all its bodies, which had been elected just in time for the 2013 polls, as part of the recommendation of the internal fact-finding probe recommending this.
The commission will come into action around the same time as local body polls are held in three provinces. Local body polls are supposed to be a PTI issue, but it has proved as disinclined to holding them as the PPP or the PML(N). It was only the strongest intervention by the Supreme Court that led to the overcoming of this resistance, and the holding of local body polls on May 30 in Khaibar Pakhtunkhwa, ruled by the PTI, and September 30 in the Punjab and Sindh, ruled respectively by the PML(N) and the PPP.
As the elections are seen by the PTI as an important test of strength, their coinciding with the operations of the commission is unfortunate, for it may well hamper the election campaign. That there will be an increased fluidity within the PTI because of the party elections will make for another distracting factor. The PTI cannot make the local body elections about the 2013 polls, as it would have liked. It will try, because as the recent high-profile petition by Imran Khan on a Lahore seat, against National Assembly Speaker Ayaz Sadiq, has shown, the PTI has few qualms about making public supposedly restricted information, provided it thinks the information can be massaged to suit its argument.
Therefore, if the commission uncovers evidence of electoral wrongdoing, the PTI will not only do its best to have this evidence made public as early as possible, but will also interpret it to mean that the election was rigged. It is unlikely that any commission will uncover the evidence the PTI wants it to, mainly because the main suspect in any rigging, the ISI, and thus the military, is also not just a bulwark of the state, but also the supposed puppetmaster of the PTI.
The PTI is thus reduced to the PPP’s best argument to prove that there was rigging: that it lost. According to this view, the PPP cannot lose because it has the support of the people. The PTI puts forward the same argument. The strongest PTI argument, that it cannot lose, will be a poor substitute for the evidence that a judicial commission will demand. While the sit-in for four months is accounted for, a great destabilizing and mobilizing factor, and while Imran’s barnstorming tour was also accounted a success, it is not noticed that precious little solid evidence, of the sort beloved by commissions, was produced before the public.
It should not be assumed that no rigging took place. It is a truism of the political system that if a candidate’s machine can wrest a political advantage it will, and will not be stopped by considerations of legality. Both mainstream parties have made it their business to award tickets to people who can fight elections. That is how they have solved the problem of campaign finance, by making the candidates pay instead of doing it themselves. For all its claims of honesty, the PTI has followed the same old model of being a party on the cheap, by not offering anything to its ticket-holders, and making them spend on their own campaigns. The machines are under the control of the candidates, and thus liable to a ‘winning-at-all-costs’ policy, which means that irregularities amounting to illegalities, are to be expected. That they represent a conspiracy is another matter. If the PPP rules so badly that the electorate votes for its opponents, that can be counted as rigging. There is a conspiracy theory which sees election results as determined by outside forces (the Army? the USA? Take your pick), and it needs the rigger to have the ability to rig those elections.
The PPP developed its rhetoric to explain its various electoral defeats, and to counter the perception that it rigged the 1977 poll. That had all the elements of rigging: the party in office, which also conducted the poll, benefited; the ordinary voter’s experience at the polling booth was of booth capturing, ballot stuffing and impersonation on a large scale. Without such experience, any irregularities in the rural boondocks, will not evoke outrage. The PTI may have taken over the rigging rhetoric from the PPP, but that only explains its defeat, it does not force a fresh election, much as PTI supporters want to see Imran Khan Prime Minister.