The democratic process of change in Pakistan has never been an easy road for the smooth propelling of this country (based on the folklores). With the incoming of interim government, the quagmire in the political running across the country had been thought to be abated, trivializing the much frigid atmosphere in the country to a conducive atmosphere for transparent elections to be held. But the prospectus somehow finds a discrepancy in its actions.
“The situation gives an ominous impression that it is all a recipe of a greater political game from the military establishment to block the level playing field for PTI to hand over the laurels to their next junior civilian face for the time being.”
The Interim Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar has been the limelight since his nomination, holding a wide array of subjects from politics to economy and foreign policy in his interviews. In this gelid environment, these highfalutin jargons weren’t going to take a long for Mr. Kakar to be drawn into a controversy. His interview with an Associated Press has set the cat among the pigeons where Mr. Kakar has asserted that free and fair elections are possible even without PTI’s chairman, Imran Khan and other jailed party workers. His acerbity has provoked some grave response from PTI who call it unconstitutional by all means.
Though the statement exceeds the interim government’s mandate, which by no benchmarks fits to a democratic one from him, but this has been the essence of political victimization in this country. Not the first interim setup in a recent time has been given the leeway to execute the script with impunity against a political rival. Even the interim setup in Punjab overrode his constitutional writ many times to cordon off PTI, for which they were installed at the first place (ostensibly, for elections only). Now with the interim government in the federal, the crackdown against PTI didn’t mitigate, under the aegis of military establishment. The situation gives an ominous impression that it is all a recipe of a greater political game from the military establishment to block the level playing field for PTI to hand over the laurels to their next junior civilian face for the time being.
What has been the statement of interim prime minister would have been a judicious one, had he not been the apple of establishment’s eye, before his selection as an interim prime minister. His assertion, that too when the judgements against Mr. Khan’s cases haven’t got their final words yet, is raising fingers on the veracity of the interim government’s role to pave a way for free and transparent elections which is prescribed in the “Constitution and Election Act 2017” to be impartial to every person and political party for conducting free and transparent elections. Though the interim setup should tinker on the routine activities, but abiding by the constitution they should hamper themselves from dubious and contentious matters.
Perhaps the country has already suffered tenuous ramifications from the contrived methods of obstructing the public’s will for the ephemeral gains of the establishment. Now is the time for the interim setup and the military establishment to shed ray of hope for the people to have a smooth transition of democracy, for the conduction of free and transparent elections, bereft of any rigging. It’s time for our stakeholders to unravel our historical errors as the current precarious state of Pakistan serves as an admonition not to iterate our fluffed experiments in the past, otherwise we risk a grim prospect of having the same unpropitious fate, we had in our past.
