SOME have celebrated the recent ‘elimination’ of a major political party from the National Assembly with the stroke of some unnamed official’s pen. Clearly, this decision has more to do with the incumbent regime’s increasingly desperate attempts to seize back two-thirds control of the Lower House, because Pakistan’s political history shows us that such restrictions never work. For context, according to the latest list of party positions in the National Assembly, the PTI has once again been erased from the parliamentary record, with the NA Secretariat counting 80 of its lawmakers as being affiliated with the Sunni Ittehad Council and eight others as ‘independents’. This list, which disregards both an earlier notification from the ECP formally notifying several dozen lawmakers as members of the PTI as well as the Supreme Court’s ruling in the reserved seats case, was apparently prepared a day before NA Speaker Ayaz Sadiq announced through a letter that no lawmaker elected as an ‘independent’ could join the PTI because the period for declaring party affiliation had passed.

Symbolically, the move makes zero difference. Whatever the Speaker and NA Secretariat say, PTI’s credentials as a political entity representative of the people of Pakistan have been attested to by millions of those who voted for it and who continue to support its politics. No parliamentary arithmetic or decree can undo or override this simple fact. In the past, the Pakistani state similarly attempted to erase political entities that were popular with citizens but undesirable in the eyes of those controlling the levers of power. Parties like the Awami League and the National Awami Party were both pushed out of the political field under the controversial Elected Bodies Disqualification Order introduced by military dictator Ayub Khan. Ultimately, those restrictions did little to diminish their support. Likewise, an attempt to kick the PPP out of politics by yet another dictator, Gen Ziaul Haq, by depriving it of its electoral symbol, failed to prevent the party from winning the 1988 polls and shaping national politics. Therefore, while this government can attempt to seize two-thirds control of the House through a perversion of the constitutional scheme of proportional representation, doing so will not automatically give it the mandate that was entrusted to the PTI by voters on Feb 8 at the ballot boxes. The government must reflect on this and reconsider.

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2024