AQIL SHAH

Pakistan in 2018
Theft of an Election

ABSTRACT

Parliamentary elections in July 2018 brought the right-wing Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf,

headed by former cricketer Imran Khan, to power. The PTI finished short of the
137 seats needed to form a government. But it emerged as the single largest party in
parliament. Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was sentenced in absentia to
10 years in prison for owning assets disproportionate to his income.
K E Y W O R D S : Pakistan, PTI, Imran Khan, election militarization, Nawaz Sharif

PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN JULY 2018 brought the right-wing Pakistan

Tehrik-e-Insaaf (Pakistan Justice Party, PTI), headed by former cricketer
Imran Khan, to power. The elections were undermined by serious allegations
of fraud and widespread interference in the electoral process by the military’s
intelligence arm, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), which sup-
ported Khan’s campaign. The ISI also sought to prevent the center-right
Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), led by former Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif, from coming to power.1 Sharif was prevented from running
in the election when the Supreme Court forced him out of office in July 2017 in
a corruption inquiry linked to the Panama Papers, not on evidence but on
a technicality. The judgement rested on the constitutional requirement of
“honesty” in members of parliament, which was inserted by military ruler
Ziaul Haq (1977–1988). The ISI reportedly intimidated PML-N members into
defecting, propped up violent extremists against the party, manipulated the
judiciary to legally target it, and took control of the voting process through
extensive military deployment inside polling stations around the country.

AQIL SHAH is the Wick Cary Assistant Professor of South Asian Politics in the David L. Boren College
of International Studies, University of Oklahoma, Norman, USA. Email: <aqil.shah@ou.edu>.

1. “HRCP Pessimistic about Free and Fair Election,” Dawn, July 17, 2018.

Asian Survey, Vol. 59, Number 1, pp. 98–107. ISSN 0004-4687, electronic ISSN 1533-838X. © 2019 by
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and
Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/
AS.2019.59.1.98.

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 SHAH / PAKISTAN IN 2018  99

Despite the military’s brazen efforts on behalf of Khan, the PTI managed
to win only 116 out of the 272 directly contested seats in the national assem-
bly, short of the 137 needed to form a government. But for the first time the
party did emerge as the single largest party in parliament. It received 31% of
the votes, up from 16% in the 2013 election, and crucially, it won seats in all
four provinces of Pakistan. The PML-N was a distant second, with 64 seats
(less than half of the 148 it had won in the previous election), mostly from
Sharif ’s stronghold in the Punjab. The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) bagged
43, mostly from its traditional electoral powerbase in rural Sindh. Khan
ultimately needed 172 votes to form a government in a house of 342 (272
plus 60 seats reserved for women and 10 for religious representatives) and
received the backing of smaller parties, including the Muhajir Qaumi
(National) Movement. In effect, the PTI’s rise indicated the apparent dis-
ruption of the two-party system comprising the PPP and the PML-N, which
emerged after Pakistan’s earlier transition to democracy in 1988.

KHAN: POPULIST OR PUPPET?

Khan’s victory fits the trend of rising support for extremist populist leaders which
has posed a challenge to liberal democratic institutions and norms from Europe
to the Americas. Like many other populist leaders, Khan is not a career politician.
He berates traditional political elites and presents himself as the only leader who
can eliminate corruption, which appeals to sections of the urban middle classes
disaffected from the PPP and the PML-N. But unlike most populist leaders,
Khan has the support of the “establishment,” which in Pakistan essentially
means the military. The military’s preference for Khan is driven by its shared
view of the two traditional parties as corrupt, incompetent, and untrustworthy in
matters of national security. The generals have long favored a cleaner “third
option.” Khan fits the bill: he is personally unblemished, and he has always
presented himself as the political alternative, vocally supported military-backed
jihadi groups like the Afghan Taliban, espoused a virulent nationalism, and
above all, expressed deference to the military’s power and position in Pakistan.

THE GENERALS AND THE JUDGES

Pakistan’s courts have been subject to severe limits on their autonomy under
prolonged periods of military rule, and their rulings often reflect military
100  ASIAN SURVEY 59:1

preferences. With the exception of a handful of dissenting judges, the

Supreme Court has legalized each of Pakistan’s three successful military
coups (in 1958, 1977, and 1999) under the “doctrine of necessity.” The military
influenced the court’s decision to disqualify Sharif from parliament. The
probe that became the basis for Sharif ’s ouster was controlled by ISI officials
and discredited by serious accusations of partiality and witness intimida-
tion. The judges also ordered the country’s top anti-corruption agency,
the National Accountability Bureau, to use the evidence collected during
the probe to initiate corruption proceedings against Sharif and his family
members.
On July 6, 2018 just three weeks before the elections, Sharif was sentenced
in absentia to 10 years in prison for owning assets disproportionate to his
income. According to the EU Election Observation Mission in Pakistan,
Sharif ’s disqualification, conviction, and subsequent arrest (after he returned
to Pakistan) drastically “reshaped the political environment ahead of the
election.”2 The judiciary went a step further by also disqualifying several
other PML-N leaders from running, on charges ranging from corruption
to contempt of court, which the EU observers described as a “systematic
effort to undermine the former ruling party.”
The main focus of the military’s electoral manipulation was the electoral
battleground province of the Punjab, which holds 141 (51.8%) of the 272
directly contested national assembly constituencies, and therefore plays a deci-
sive role in government formation. In the months leading up to the vote, ISI
officials reportedly intimidated and blackmailed PML-N election candidates
to abandon the party.3 These efforts bore fruit, as 30 of the party’s candidates
in the Punjab reportedly defected to join the PTI or ran as independents,
which according to the EU observers “contributed to splitting the [party’s]
votes and influencing the results.”4
The military tried to further undercut Sharif ’s conservative Muslim vote
bank by recasting Islamist militant groups of different sects as political par-
ties. This “mainstreaming,” as the military calls it, was also intended to deflect

2. “Final Report of the European Union Election Observation Mission (EUEOM) to Pakistan,”
October 26, 2018, 10.
3. “Sharif Accuses Pakistan Army of ‘Attempting to Rig Elections’,” NDTV, July 11, 2018,
<https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/nawaz-sharif-accuses-pakistan-army-of-attempting-to-rig-
elections-1881754>.
4. EUEOM report, 11.
 SHAH / PAKISTAN IN 2018  101

international pressure to rein in its jihadi proxies.5 For example, the Ahle
Hadith Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous) front organization Markaz
al-Dawatul Irshad (Center for Religious Learning and Propagation, also
known as Jamaat al-Dawa) reinvented itself as the Milli (National) Muslim
League to compete in elections. The Barelvi Islamist group Tehrik-e-Labaik-
Pakistan (TLP), the political front of Tehri-e-Labbaik Ya RasoolAllah (Move-
ment of Allegiance to the Messenger of Allah)—inspired by the police guard
Mumtaz Qadri, who murdered Punjab Governor Salman Taseer in 2011 over
his criticism of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, and committed to violently
implementing Pakistan’s them—also fielded candidates. The military’s hand
in its meteoric rise to national political prominence was clearly visible in the
role it played in the TLP’s three-week anti-government “sit-in” in 2017. This
action blocked the main highway into the capital, Islamabad, to force the
resignation of the PML-N law minister accused of blasphemy in changing the
oath of elective office to dilute the pledge of allegiance to the finality of
the Prophet Mohammad. As Khan opportunistically blamed the government
for the blasphemy and sided with the TLP, the military refused to come to
the aid of the PML-N government against the protesters, and the protests
ended only after the government accepted their demands, in an agreement
brokered by the military.

SILENCING THE MEDIA

The military also undermined the election through systematic muzzling of

the media, particularly those it perceived as sympathetic to Sharif. The
electronic news media, though liberalized under former President Pervez
Musharraf ’s authoritarian rule, are severely restricted in reporting on the
military, for example its gross human rights violations in Baluchistan Prov-
ince, the site of a low-intensity insurgency by Baloch nationalists demanding
provincial autonomy. The military has sought to manufacture a public nar-
rative that exalts its sacrifices for the security of the nation through TV and
radio channels owned by its proxies, embedded journalists in other news
organizations, and implanted experts who dominate TV talk shows. At the
same time, it has silenced any criticism of its institutional policies by creating

5. “Pakistan Army Pushed Political Role for Militant Linked Groups,” Reuters, September 15,
2017.
102  ASIAN SURVEY 59:1

an environment of fear that encourages widespread self-censorship. The few

independent news organizations that continue to defy the generals and sup-
port democratic institutions have borne the brunt of the military’s campaign
of intimidation and censorship. In the run-up to the July 2018 parliamentary
elections, the military continued its assault on media freedoms, including
publicly identifying several journalists and activists as threats to national
security, illegally detaining journalists, pressuring editors to pull critical opin-
ion articles, and cracking down on dissenting TV news channels such as
Dawn and Geo TV.6

THE ELECTORAL CONTEST

Pre-poll surveys showed that the election was essentially a close contest
between the PML-N and the PTI, with the PPP in third place. In the Punjab,
however, the PML-N had a considerable lead over the PTI.7 The PML-N’s
official election campaign centered on the party’s performance in office,
including significantly reducing Pakistan’s chronic power shortages, as well
as claiming credit for the US$ 64 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
At large election rallies in Punjab and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Prov-
ince, Sharif used the rallying cry of “vote ko izzat dau” (honor the vote) to
forcefully remind his supporters that his ouster was a direct assault on the
sanctity of their ballots. He urged the voters to avenge the disrespect of their
vote by returning him to office so that he could continue to provide much-
needed economic development and establish civilian supremacy over the
khalai makhlooq (aliens)—a popular new Urdu term for the military officials
accused of election meddling. In contrast, Khan ran on an “anti-corruption”
agenda popular with members of the urban middle classes, many of whom
blame the alleged corruption of the Sharifs and the Bhuttos for the country’s
political and economic ills. Khan’s simple but intuitive solutions to Pakistan’s
complex economic woes, such as the speedy recovery of $200 billion from the
alleged offshore accounts of corrupt politicians, appealed to other voters
desperate for change. Khan promised a revolutionary Naya Pakistan (New

6. Hameed Haroon, “A Dirty War on Freedom of the Press in Pakistan,” Washington Post, July
11, 2018.
7. “Election Exclusive: 3 Poll Results In! Who Will You Vote for Pakistan?” Geo News, July
2018, <https://www.geo.tv/latest/201653-elections-exclusive-3-poll-results-in-who-will-you-vote-for-
pakistan>.
 SHAH / PAKISTAN IN 2018  103

Pakistan), modelled on the seventh-century welfare state of Medina (Saudi

Arabia), where justice, the rule of law, and merit will prevail. His reformist
agenda was also infused with a heavy dose of nationalism, and he has vowed
to restore the country’s honor by ending its reliance on US and other foreign
aid. The PTI’s election campaign was less than impressive, and many of
Khan’s rallies in the Punjab were poorly attended, which his critics say is
evidence that the party’s popularity is manufactured.
The election was Pakistan’s most militarized to date. Ostensibly at the
request of the Election Commission for security, the army deployed an
unprecedented 370,000 soldiers for election duty, who took control of the
85,000 polling stations. Army personnel were given judicial powers, and
allowed to deploy inside the polling stations, reportedly against the wishes
of most political parties.8 In many cases, the soldiers denied journalists entry
into polling stations, evicted polling agents (party workers who observe the
counting process), and took full control over the counting, particularly in
constituencies with close races between the PTI and the PML-N.
The army denied it, but opposition parties alleged massive rigging of the
vote. The EU Election Observation Mission lent credence to these allega-
tions, noting that “during counting, security personnel recorded and trans-
mitted the results, giving the impression of a parallel tabulation.”9 The results
were announced more than a day after they were due under the 2017 Election
Act, furthering doubts about the fairness of the count. The Election Com-
mission of Pakistan claimed that the delay was due to a technical problem
caused by the malfunction of its electronic results transmission system, which
prevented local election officials from uploading the results to its central
database on time. But credible media reports suggested that the transmission
system never broke down, and that the election officials deliberately aban-
doned its use after receiving instructions from “unknown officials,” a euphe-
mism for military intelligence.10
In addition to emerging as the largest party in the national assembly, the
PTI made unusually strong gains in provincial elections. For example, the
party had won a plurality of seats in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Province in the 2013 election. But it won a two-thirds majority in 2018 in

8. EUEOM report, 20.

9. Ibid., 45.
10. “ECP Wants FIA to Probe Unknown Caller Who Ordered RTS Closure,” Dawn, October
11, 2018.
104  ASIAN SURVEY 59:1

a province that has historically voted out incumbents. The Awami National
Party, which ruled the provinces from 2008 to 2013, won only seven seats,
reaffirming its relative electoral decline. The PTI captured 122 seats against
the PML-N’s 130, in Sharif ’s stronghold, Punjab, short of the 149 seats
needed to form a government in a house of 297. With 30 seats, independent
candidates formed the third-largest bloc in the assembly, and thus held the
deciding votes. Ultimately, the PTI formed a coalition government with the
support of 27 independents and seven from the PML-Q.11
The PPP also accused the ISI of intimidating its candidates into defecting.
But it retained its stronghold in Sindh, winning a majority of seats and
forming the provincial government for the third consecutive time. The PTI
emerged as the main opposition party, as it secured the second-most seats in
the provincial assembly. In Balochistan, the military-backed Balochistan
Awami (People’s) Party, created out of PML-N dissidents and other elect-
ables, won the most seats and entered into a coalition with the PTI. The
Islamists generally fared poorly at the polls. The Milli Muslim League failed
to win any seats at the national and provincial levels, and most of the top
leaders of other established Islamist parties, Jamiat Ulema Islam-Fazl
(Congress of Islamic Scholars, headed by Maulan Fazlur Rehman) and
Jamaat-e-Islami (Islamic Congress), lost elections. Their electoral alliance,
the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (United Action Council), got 8.5% of the vote
and won just 12 national assembly seats. In contrast, the TLP emerged as the
electorally dominant Islamist party. Although it failed to win any national
assembly seats, it was the fifth-largest party countrywide, and the third-largest
in the province, in terms of vote share. It won two provincial assembly seats
in Sindh Province, and crucially, cut into the PML-N’s conservative vote
bank by securing 10% of the votes in the Punjab.
The opposition parties, including the PML-N, rejected the results and
vowed to launch protests, which could have jeopardized the formation of the
new government. While the smaller Pashtun ethnic and religious parties, led
by the Jamiat Ulema Islam-Fazl, demanded a new election, the PML-N and
the PPP ultimately decided to join the parliament, arguing that they would
be in a better position to challenge the rigged election results from inside the
government.

11. The Q here stands for quaid-e-azam (great leader), the honorary title of Pakistan’s founder,
Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
 SHAH / PAKISTAN IN 2018  105

EXTREMISTS EMBOLDENED

Emboldened by the state’s capitulation to its demands a year earlier, the TLP
took to the streets again in early November, after the Supreme Court acquit-
ted Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman on death row for blasphemy on the basis of
her coerced testimony and false witness statements. The TLP declared the
judges apostates deserving of death, and incited the army to revolt against its
chief, General Bajwa, because he was allegedly an Ahmadi, a minority sect
officially declared non-Muslim in 1974 for its apparent disbelief in the
Prophet Mohammad’s finality. TLP supporters blockaded highways across
Pakistan, destroyed private and public property, and clashed with the police.
Khan’s government struck an agreement with the TLP, once again brokered
by the ISI, in which the government pledged to put Bibi on a government
no-fly list, allow an appeal seeking to overturn her acquittal, and release all
protesters, in return for an end to the protests. While Khadim Hussain Rizvi
and other TLP leaders were subsequently placed in “protective custody” for
refusing to call off another planned protest, by showing their unwillingness to
enforce the rule of law, Khan and his military sponsors have undermined state
authority, given a fillip to the TLP’s bigotry, and further reduced the cost to
such groups of using violence to achieve political goals.
As the military constricts the civic space for opposition and dissent, it
expects Khan to do its bidding if he wants to remain prime minister. And
there is no indication that he disagrees with the military on important
domestic and external issues. Hence, civil–military relations are likely to be
harmonious for the foreseeable future. But this façade only serves to mask the
unstable power imbalance between the politicians and the army.

FOREIGN RELATIONS

Khan has positioned himself as a Pakistani nationalist who opposes American

intervention in the region. In fact, Khan partly revived his dormant political
career by strident opposition to the presence of the US, which, like many
others in Pakistan and its military, he holds responsible for the rise of militancy
in the region. In particular, he has vociferously opposed the CIA’s employment
of armed drones in the northwestern borderlands of Pakistan and threatened to
shoot them down if he ever became prime minister. Khan has made relatively
pragmatic statements on relations with the country’s neighbors, such as a rela-
tionship with India based on peace and trade rather than conflict.
106  ASIAN SURVEY 59:1

But in trying to appear strong compared to his predecessors, Khan and his
government have made a series of blunders. For example, his government
forcefully denied that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had urged Khan in
a telephone call to act against terrorists operating in Pakistan, only to back-
track after the Americans released a transcript of the conversation. Despite his
government’s declared independence in domestic and foreign policy, Khan
owes his most notable initiative—the opening of a border corridor in Kar-
tarpur (Punjab), home to a Sikh holy site, to pilgrims from India—to the
army’s chief of staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa. In an apparent bid to end
Pakistan’s diplomatic isolation by appearing conciliatory toward archrival
India, Bajwa offered to open the crossing when he met with a prominent
Indian Sikh politician and former cricketer who was visiting Pakistan for
Khan’s inauguration.12

THE ECONOMY

Khan came to power on the basis of unrealistic populist promises, such as

providing 10 million jobs and five million units of public housing, even
though Pakistan depends on external financing to keep its economy afloat.
In fact, his government is in talks to seek an IMF bailout package to avert
a balance-of-payments crisis. According to an IMF assessment, Pakistan is
facing an increasingly difficult economic situation, with high fiscal and cur-
rent account deficits, and low international reserves, which have plummeted
during to external debt financing. Economic growth is also likely to slow
significantly.13 Since December 2017, the Pakistani rupee has depreciated by
30%. As part of IMF-led stabilization conditions, the PTI government has
slashed development expenditures and raised gas and electricity tariffs.
Despite promises to break the proverbial “begging bowl,” the Khan govern-
ment’s desperate pleas for financing to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and China
have resulted in the two countries pledging a total of $11 billion in budgetary
and other economic support.
The most significant economic development in recent years has been
the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which comprises Chinese loans,

12. Khalid Khattak, “Rashid Lauds COAS Contribution to Kartarpur Corridor,” The News
(Karachi), December 2, 2018.
13. International Monetary Fund, “IMF Staff Concludes Visit to Pakistan,” October 4, 2018,
<https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2018/10/04/pr18379-imf-staff-concludes-visit-to-pakistan>.
 SHAH / PAKISTAN IN 2018  107

investments, and grants worth an estimated $60 billion for energy and infra-
structure projects. It envisions a network of highways, railroads, and ports
linking China’s restive western Xinjiang region to Pakistan’s southern
Arabian Sea port of Gwadar. While the economic corridor has been hailed
as a “game changer” for Pakistan’s ailing economy, recent news reports
suggest that it will impose a significant debt burden on the country in the
coming years (an average of $2 billion per year).14

14. “Pakistan to Pay China $40 bn on 26.5 b CPEC Investments,” Express Tribune, December
26, 2018.