Who returns from the dead, this Thursday in Pakistan, is not Nawaz Sharif but Imran Jan. The candidates of the latter’s party (PTI), forced to run as independents due to the banning of their acronym, achieved by far the largest number of seats. A slap in the face for Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League (PML-N) and for the military leadership, which had rescued him from his fugitive status in London, as a penultimate resource to dissolve Hurricane Jan.
The former captain of the cricket team and former prime minister should have been a political corpse, after six months behind bars. However, the succession of prison sentences, a few days before the elections, instead of finishing off Imran Khan, has increased the determination of his supporters.
An apparent setback for Nawaz Sharif, who was confident of receiving a fourth chance to rule in Islamabad, with the blessing of the Headquarters in Rawalpindi. However, this possibility cannot be ruled out, along with a coalition or power sharing with the PPP, which would be the third most voted force.
Because if the PTI could not compete on an equal footing during the campaign and during election day, it would also be being harmed during the scrutiny with all kinds of tricks, according to its militants. They have seen how the estimates with real votes from the television stations, which gave them half or more of the seats, have been drastically reduced as, twenty-four hours later, the counting continues and the official allocation of seats advances in dribs and drabs.
When the meridian of seats has just been passed, 62 have been won by “independents” (almost all of them, militants of Khan’s PTI), 46 for Sharif’s PML-N and 39 for the Bhutto’s PPP. Before arriving here, a whole day of incomprehensible stops in counting, blackouts and sign changes, which increase allegations of manipulation of results, even above what is usual in Pakistan.
Even a former prime minister under the acronym of the Muslim League, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, tweeted early in the morning that “the people of Pakistan have spoken loud and clear. Any attempt to manipulate their mandate will result in unbearable chaos.” A reference to the price to pay in case of stealing victory from Jan’s PTI, despite the evidence at the exit that its “independent” candidates, even with the entire system against them, would have been the most favored by the electorate.
The Karachi stock market, which opened with losses of more than 3%, is now losing 2%, given the difficulties that are looming for a coalition government headed by Nawaz Sharif, which was the way out of the crisis sponsored by the establishment.
A bet that involved banning the acronym of the party with the greatest support in the polls and imprisoning its leader and its most notorious figures, such as the former Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmud Qureshi. To make matters worse, throughout the entire election day there was a blackout in mobile services and, to a large extent, the internet. Ostensibly for security reasons, but undeclared, to prevent mobilizations. Millions of people who were waiting for an SMS to know their polling station on the same day were left blind.
Meanwhile, the GEO television channel, which after a few hours of scrutiny gave the parliamentary majority to the “independents” of the PTI, now attributes to them 74 more or less safe seats, compared to 49 for the PML-N and 39 for the PPP, having take into account those already purified.
If the impossibility of a PML-N government of the Sharifs were confirmed, the military’s plan B would be a coalition that is as broad and unstable as possible, in order to reinforce its leading role in the main political lines, especially in relation to India. , United States, Afghanistan and China. The pact between PML-N and the PPP – which already occurred since the defenestration of Imran Jan, in April 2022, until August of last year – facilitates the geographical division of their vote. The first concentrated in Punjab and the second in Sind. The great results of the young Foreign Minister during the last term, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari (PPP), make him an actor to take into account for the future.
According to military authorities, during the day there were fifty terrorist attacks near the Afghan border, resulting in a dozen deaths, ten of them members of the security forces. For decades, security objectives have prevailed over those of democracy and development, with advances and setbacks in both fields.
Every country has an army but only Pakistan army has a country. To this saying with decades of history we should add that there is method in its madness. In the previous elections, in 2018, this involved elevating the legendary athlete Imran Khan, while keeping the businessman and three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif in jail. Five and a half years later, he has to elevate Sharif while keeping Jan under seven locks – and almost as many sentences.
However, this plan is affected – although not aborted – at the polls. Almost two years after the controversial motion of no confidence against Imran Khan – rightly described as a populist leader – the country’s economic and financial situation, instead of improving, has deteriorated, as have its institutions.
Imran Jan began to write his epitaph, unknowingly, the day he decided to relieve General Asim Munir as head of the ISI – Pakistan’s main intelligence service – after just eight months. In his place he placed Faiz Hameed, whom he had the audacity to send to Kabul to organize the Taliban government when not even two weeks had passed since the departure of the last marine. “The Afghans have broken the chains,” Jan said, aligned with the sentiments of many Pakistanis.
Although this and nothing else had been the policy of the Pakistan Armed Forces since they helped create the Taliban thirty years ago, making it explicit put both the head of the army, General Bajwa, and his Western partners in a compromising situation. When Imran Jan wanted to extend Hameed’s mandate – as if his power to elect the head of the ISI were real and not fictitious – he clashed with Bajwa, who evidently took the lead. Four months after his intelligence chief fell, it was Jan himself who was removed from power, in a motion of no confidence that was put into motion as soon as he returned from the Kremlin, on the same day of the invasion of Ukraine.
His replacement, Shehbaz Sharif – Nawaz’s younger brother and former head of government of Punjab – would demonstrate cunning by appointing as the new head of the army, at the end of Qamar Javed Bajwa’s turn, the aforementioned general and superspy Asim Munir, someone who as a young man had memorized the Quran from cover to cover and that he had unfinished business with Imran Jan. Knowing what was coming, Hameed immediately requested early retirement.
Imran Jan, for his part, had before him an attack with a bullet in the leg, an illegal arrest – which unleashed a wave of violence against military installations – and another that seemed definitive, since last August, with three sentences totaling 31 years. in jail, on ridiculous charges, substantiated just a week ago.
Shehbaz Sharif, heading a coalition government with the Bhutto People’s Party, appointed Asim Munir and, in fairness, Munir was to oversee that civil power returned – ostensibly – to the hands of his elder brother, Nawaz Sharif. A script that could have been altered, rather than disrupted, this Thursday, after many months of high tension.
Nawaz Sharif, a businessman with one foot in feudal Punjab, began his political career as a political junior of dictator Ziaul Haq. He was then the least bad prime minister, for the military, during his twice-interrupted alternation with Benazir Bhutto. Both experienced prison and exile, a penance reserved in Pakistan for civilians, as if corruption were a vice absent in its barracks and fenced communities.
She also ended up dead in an attack shortly after returning, during the election campaign in which General Musharraf was beginning to give up power.
Since then, no general has returned to the foreground. But behind the scenes, they have never left. This Thursday, the wheel of fortune should have pointed to Nawaz Sharif. In Pakistan everyone knows that it is not just votes that make it spin. But apparently votes still count. Although, who counts them and how they count them is something that the Pakistanis are going to question in the coming days.
