Imran Khan’s party is hopeful that Pakistan’s Supreme Court will restore its 78 seats.
ISLAMABAD: Former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is hopeful of recapturing at least 78 reserved parliamentary seats allotted to rival parties after the February 8 general elections, Khan’s spokesman said on Tuesday.
A few weeks before the national elections, Khan’s PTI was stripped of its election symbol, the cricket bat, for technical reasons and all its candidates had to contest as independents. After the elections, in which Khan-backed independents won the most seats overall, they joined the Sunni Ittehad Council (SIC) to demand quotas for seats reserved for women and religious minorities. Under Pakistan’s electoral rules, political parties are allotted seats according to the number of seats they win in an election. This brings the total number of seats in the National Assembly to 336.
But the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) ruled in March that Khan’s SIC party was ineligible to win additional seats in parliament, dealing a blow to the embattled group’s power prospects and a major setback for Khan, who is jailed on a string of convictions. The Election Commission’s decision was upheld by the Peshawar High Court but was overturned by the Supreme Court last month, after which the ECP suspended 77 lawmakers from Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s ruling coalition.
The Supreme Court’s 13-judge bench is currently hearing a batch of petitions filed by the SIC chairman challenging the denial of seats to the party and the allocation of seats to other parties that have joined Sharif’s ruling coalition.
“Reserved seats are our constitutional right. How can the Election Commission take away our legal right?” Khan’s spokesman, lawyer Naeem Haider Panjuta, told Arab News.
“We are very hopeful that the Supreme Court will give us back the powers that were taken away from us and give us justice,” he said.
Panjuta added that the party’s lawyers would file a “strong case” in the Supreme Court to win back its 78 seats in parliament and provincial assemblies.
“Justice from the Courts”
The ECP’s suspension of 77 lawmakers reduced the number of seats in parliament held by Prime Minister Sharif’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) from 121 to 107, while its main coalition partner, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), lost seats from 72 to 67.
This means the ruling coalition has lost its two-thirds majority in Parliament, dropping from 228 to 209 seats. A two-thirds majority in the 336-seat Parliament requires 224 seats, without which the government cannot push through constitutional reform.
After a February general election that left his party at odds with the ruling coalition, Sharif formed a weak coalition with other parties, giving the PML-N 79 seats and the PPP 54 seats a simple majority in parliament to form the government, and also included smaller parties.
Khan’s candidates won the most seats, with 93, but not enough to form a government. Khan and his party reject the results, alleging widespread electoral fraud.
Khan’s party received good news this week when the Islamabad High Court overturned his party leader’s conviction for leaking state secrets. Earlier this year, the 71-year-old Khan was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a lower court for publishing classified cables sent to Islamabad by Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington in 2022. He has been incarcerated since August last year and faces a host of legal challenges.
“Our leaders and workers are implicated in hundreds of false cases,” Panjuta said, “and slowly justice is being delivered by the courts.”
