The former led his party from jail, while the latter heralded the campaign after returning from a self-imposed exile.

Marred by the allegations of rigging during all stages of the electoral process, it still unveiled a remarkable political landscape characterised by the military establishment’s monopoly over violent meddling in politics; persecution of one party (Imran Khan’s PTI in this case), while strategic manoeuvring that favoured another party (Nawaz Sharif’s PMLN); shockingly lopsided judgments by courts against Khan; and a conspicuous shift in the traditional power equations.

At the heart of this transformation was a public response to the military establishment’s highhandedness against Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leaders and workers.

Rising from ashes

Weeks before the elections, the Supreme Court of Pakistan upheld the decision of the Election Commission of Pakistan to strip PTI of its election symbol — the cricket bat — for not holding intra-party elections in compliance with the legal obligations and the party’s own constitution. The fairness and the validity of this decision per the spirit of the constitution remains debatable and has been criticised by many political commentators, many of whom have expressed concern about the perception of partisanship by the court that might be appeasing the powerful military by playing a role in pushing PTI to the wall.

This was followed by three hasty judgments against Imran Khan in a single week, handing him decades of rigorous sentences put together in controversial cases. Meanwhile, the entire central leadership of the party was either incarcerated in frivolous cases or was at large escaping from the long arm of law after being accused of instigating violent events of May 9, 2023, when several military installations were broken into and set ablaze.

(Hundreds of PTI workers and mid-level leaders were apprehended after those unfortunate events. However, many party leaders were given a safe passage if they publicly denounced Khan and the May 9 violence. Some of them made new parties. All became well for them. But this put a lot of pressure on the PTI rank and file, who were persecuted, threatened, and worse, tortured in custody.)

In short, PTI was being ground from all sides. Almost all the political pundits predicted a humiliating defeat of PTI in the elections. Khan is finished, was the buzzword even hours before the elections. Journalists on the ground and opinion polls of all ilk predicted a landslide victory by Nawaz Sharif’s PMLN. Sharif himself said on the polling day, while talking to the media, that he would not even listen to the word coalition and that he hoped for a comfortable majority to form the government on his own.

One can disagree with and criticise Khan’s politics as one likes, but one has to give him credit for mobilising young people, especially the urban middle and upper-middle-class youth adept at creative usage of tech and social media. Immediately after their election symbol was taken away, PTI knew they needed to do something. With impressive finesse, they created an app on Imran Khan’s Facebook page where the constituents could put the number of their constituency and get the name of the PTI-backed independent candidate with the allotted election symbol.

Within a couple of days, that Facebook page was suspended. PTI transformed the app into a portal on PTI’s website. Within hours, its website was suspended. Hardly a surprise. The PTI tech team, after that, made WhatsApp groups in almost every constituency with thousands of members and put an efficient mechanism of information sharing in place. While responding to the journalists and opinion survey companies with whatever they wanted to hear, it seems the PTI voters kept their real electoral choice to themselves. No one was able to predict such a massive turnout in PTI’s favour.

But after that initial excitement and seeing the numbers, the question is, was it really as stunning a ‘victory’ as it seemed? Was the voting pattern as massive as one thought it was? Maybe some number crunching could help.

Although the numbers are not significantly changing, if these numbers tell something, it is that people in both these elections voted for the party they thought was resisting the military. But in terms of the number of seats won, both parties won more seats when they were perceived as getting the military’s support.

With all the resistance and the sympathy vote that it appears to have bagged in 2024, PTI has lost almost 23 seats compared to its performance in 2018. Owing to its dismal performance during three and half years of its tenure in the government and the absence of party organisation at the grassroots, it could have lost many more had it not been so crudely pushed down by the military establishment.

Strike against the empire

These results, however, are truly an egg in the military's face after it tried every trick in its bag to keep Imran Khan from the electoral victory and, eventually, the power structure. But it would be too early to say that the people have defeated the military by standing up to its tactics of political engineering.

As they say, there’s many a slip between cup and lip. Despite being the largest group to have won the National Assembly seats, these PTI-backed independent candidates are still ‘independent’ in choosing which way to go.

PTI will soon have to decide which other parties it could invite as part of its coalition. Going by its aggressive posture against PMLN and PPP over the past three decades, it is difficult to assume PTI would go to any of them to form a coalition. The rest of the groups might be too small to give the required number to make the government, ie, 169.

Meanwhile, let’s not forget that none of the parties or the independent candidates are ‘independent’ enough to resist the carrot or stick that might come from the military, nudging them to go in a certain direction of the generals’ choosing. The independent candidates, as has been happening for a very long time in Pakistan, either go to the party that has a clear chance of making the government or, in case this clarity is lacking, they accept the direction of the establishment. 

It remains to be seen if the PTI-backed candidates who got people’s votes in resistance to the military’s political meddling would find the strength and resolve to resist it or not. The next few days will decide the course of civil-military relations for the next few years.

• KAJAL AGARWAL