Done and dusted. Most of the day after the top most court decided to remove PTI from the elections by supporting the election commission’s decision was entangled in pessimistic banters, disheartening surveys about the credibility of the upcoming elections and a general bad press in the international media.
One think tank, in particular, went on to exclaim that without a bat, elections would cease to adequately represent the will of the people. Some of the legal eagles are still willing to give the verdict a benefit of “technical” doubt as they stand behind the Chief Justice of Pakistan’s reading of the constitution and his resolve to ensure the embodiment of democracy.
There might not be any qualms about the weakness of the arguments echoing in the courtroom, but for all those who believe Saturday was a fine day for Pakistan’s constitution, the law cannot be reduced to a simple equation of form and substance. Optics matter, and long after the dust has settled, people would not remember how a political party failed to convince the election commission about the authenticity of its inter-party polls but that the higher judiciary willingly chose to deliver a fatal blow to democratic jurisprudence.
Instead of getting overwhelmed by the painstaking process of ensuring transparency and accountability in a single political player, the state should have been more invested in the transparency of the entire exercise. With candidates being forced to put resources in individualised campaigns, voters stripped of a unifying symbol around which they could gather in testing times and the prospects for horse-trading further diminishing the slice of PTI’s pie, there is a lot that needs to be addressed in the coming days.
According to the verdict, ECP may not have victimised the PTI, but can we say the same about the mandate of millions? Is their constitutionally guaranteed right to representations being protected? *
