‘Election engineering’: Is Pakistan’s February vote already rigged?

Islamabad, Pakistan — A former prime minister is in jail. Election authorities are busy stopping his party’s candidates from contesting. And another ex-premier, previously imprisoned and then in exile, is now back, with the cases against him dropped.

Less than a month before Pakistan holds its 12th general elections on February 8, concerns are mounting among analysts and sections of the political class that the coming vote might rank near the top of the list of most manipulated votes even in the country’s chequered democratic journey.

Critics point to the crackdown by state authorities against Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and its charismatic leader, Imran Khan, as evidence of widespread rigging that could deny the former prime minister and his party a shot at a fair contest.

Khan, who as cricket captain had led Pakistan to the 1992 World Cup win, has been in jail since August 2023, facing multiple charges including corruption, revealing state secrets, and over attacks on military facilities by his supporters. He has denied all the charges.

Large numbers of his party’s leaders have quit the PTI, seemingly under duress. Many of them are currently underground, seeking to avoid arrest, while others have defected and joined rival political parties.

Multiple electoral nominees from the PTI, including Khan himself, have seen their nomination papers rejected by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), the electoral watchdog. Khan was last month forced out of the chairmanship of his party due to his imprisonment. Gohar Ali Khan, a relatively unknown lawyer who joined the party less than three years ago, was named the new head. The PTI is also struggling to keep hold of its iconic symbol, a cricket bat, amid a legal battle with the ECP in the country’s Supreme Court.

“This time around the manner in which PTI and its cadres have been brutalised, it has not happened in the history of Pakistan,” Shayan Bashir, PTI’s information secretary in the state of Punjab, told media.

“Snatching of nomination papers, nomination of candidates in police reports, rejection of nominations on unprecedented scale, forcing PTI candidates to abandon the party under duress, all this evidence is available to show what the party has to endure,” Bashir added.

Fears of election manipulation are hardly new in the country of 240 million people. In fact, longtime observers of Pakistani politics and elections say that historically, most elections in the country have been tainted to various degrees.