General elections and political upheavals
PRESIDENT Arif Alvi, through a letter has asked Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif to hold elections and avoid contempt of court. The basis of his letter is that the government institutions did not cooperate in the conduct of the elections, due to which the responsibility of postponing the elections from the constitutional period may fall on Shahbaz Sharif as Prime Minister and he may be found guilty of contempt of court. This point in President’s letter can also be called a guideline for the judiciary, otherwise, when the PTI went to the Supreme Court due to the new date of elections with the claim that this move invokes Article 6, Alvi’s threat of contempt of court reminds us that Yusuf Raza Gilani was also sent home from the Prime Minister’s House in the same way.
The basic point to understand is that if the Constitution says that any Chief Minister has the power to dissolve his Assembly, it also says that the assemblies shall be elected for a term of five years. The Constitution also says that when an ordinary officer spends even a single rupee, he will justify it. Now, the assemblies were dissolved by regular blackmailing of the two chief ministers, and the expenses of billions of rupees for the elections which were to be spent on the completion of the period given in the Constitution, were first put on the national treasury. It is the failure of the PDM coalition and the government that they could not bring Imran Khan and Parvez Elahi to justice. The assemblies were dissolved with the intention that under pressure, the national and the remaining two provincial assemblies would also be dissolved before the end of the term, as the PTI believed that Imran Khan was at the height of his popularity at that time.
The question is that when the President of the State was writing a letter to uphold the Constitution, has he himself been abiding by the Constitution before that. He is a president who dissolved the assembly at the behest of a prime minister who did not have a majority in the assembly and he violated the constitutional term through his loyal deputy speaker, within which the count on the no-confidence motion was necessary. In other words, he gave an order to dissolve the representative assembly of 22 million people of Pakistan at the behest of an unknown person, gave loyalty to the individual instead of the state and sabotaged the constitution. The decision of the Supreme Court on this clarifying the same article that the President himself is talking about. Arif Alvi should also be questioned as to why he is protecting the interests of a group instead of the state.
PTI and its honourable president are adamant that the elections cannot go beyond ninety days, but the interesting thing is that in favour of the objection, they present the same decision of the Supreme Court in which the dates of April 30 and May 28 were initially fixed. The question is, do these two dates fall within ninety days? The answer is no. If these dates are already delayed by up to one and a half months, so if the delay will be longer than three or six months, so what does matter? The question is also how did Mr. President think that the old political parties of this country will play political and electoral matches only at that place and at that time which will be decided by Imran Khan. Imran Khan surprises everyone when he talks about the Constitution. With the help of the establishment, rallies and popularization, protests and dharnas, disqualifying and imprisoning opponents, breaking electables and shutting down RTS, abducting those who won elections as independents and bringing them to Bani Gala, and even the women of the opponents were sent to prisons was constitutional?? not at all.
PDM did not go to court to restore the assemblies that why would they go to restore PTI governments? The ruling party was replacing the partisan PTI with neutral caretaker governments. People like us kept advising Imran Khan not to do this, stay within the framework of the Constitution and parliamentary democracy, but he has taken an oath not to listen to anyone’s reason or logic. The Constitution itself allows that the work which cannot be done within the prescribed period, there is no problem in doing it after that period, now, if the Ministry of Finance did not keep billions of rupees in this budget for the election, so from where did they get so much money? The point is also that when the Judiciary itself is not providing ROs, how can it ask other institutions to compulsorily provide their personnel such as the Army. The army says that they are engaged in security operations. A constitutional question is also whether there will be a new census and new constituencies in the National Assembly and the two provincial assemblies, while in the two provinces on the old census, why?
I understand that the Supreme Court will try its best to force the government to hold elections, but a timeline has been set. Just as the dates of April 10th and November 29th of last year were important in the political history of Pakistan, similarly the dates of September 6th and then September 16th of this year are important. There will be two major changes. The PTI will lose two Centres of power within the system and thus this October will completely end the regime change operation that started with a rally in October 2011. The general elections will be held in October or after October and the game played for the last twelve years will definitely be over.
I have said in my earlier articles that rebellion is just a scare, nothing like that is going to happen. The roundup of thousands of salaried people on social media has started. PTI’s Minar-e-Pakistan rally has failed miserably. Imran Khan is now left with nothing but interviews about the collapse of the country and the destruction of the army. This is always the result of greed for power and self-righteousness. Pakistan Zindabad.
