KARACHI: Legal and electoral experts have mixed views on the Supreme Court’s verdict on Saturday, with some seeing it as a blow to voters’ rights, while others termed it a result of the PTI not offering enough legal arguments during the proceedings.
Speaking to The News on Saturday night, PILDAT President Ahmed Bilal Mehboob said, “PTI focused on political considerations in the case and almost ignored legal and constitutional grounds. Since the courts are a legal forum, political arguments have not cut through the ice much.”
According to him, “the SC judgment is clearly a big setback for the party. The real loss is the removal of 226 reserved seats including 60 in NA. It deprives the party of its chance, if any, of coming to power, but parties fall and rise again.”
Mehboob advises the PTI to “get rid of its focus on agitational politics and instead prepare to become an effective opposition in the National Assembly and the Punjab Assembly”, adding that the party “may even be able to form a government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.” “
Should that happen, Mehboob’s advice to the PTI is that “healthier elements in the party should aim to play as effective a role as possible, whether in the opposition or in the provincial government, and establish working relationships with its opponents”.
Reacting to the Supreme Court’s verdict on Saturday night, lawyer and independent politician Jibran Nasser explained the consequences the PTI now faces after losing the ‘bat’ symbol.
Tweeting that there is now no “option for PTI-affiliated candidates except to run as independents”, Nasir wrote that “every single candidate will have to do an individual campaign with customized advertising as each would have a different symbol.” This has a direct impact on election costs, organization, campaigning, etc.
According to Nasser, if the PTI retained its unified symbol despite not being allowed to campaign, its voters “could mobilize and organize around the unified symbol, which now will not be able to further disrupt the campaign”.
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In his post on X, earlier Twitter, Nasir also said that now “All those PTI affiliated independents who win will be notified by ECP as independent winners and they would be free to join any party as per the constitution. This means that a candidate who could win with the support of PTI voters may join the post-election PMLN or PPP under duress, influence or for personal gain. This will enable ‘Halal’ horse trading.’
Per Nasir, PTI “loses all prospects of reserve seats. Unfortunately, this is tantamount to disenfranchising tens of millions of voters across Pakistan.
Lawyer Reema Omer also took to X to post her reaction to the verdict. Omer called it an “excessive, punitive response to the failure to conduct internal party polls as required by law” and tweeted that the verdict “is a huge blow to our fundamental rights jurisprudence when it comes to political parties [and] political participation.”
