Imran Khan does not believe election mandate was stolen from him

Data from Election Tribunals, the Election Commission and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) confirm that a total of 58 seats have been contested in the Election Tribunals by the PTI.

The Free and Fair Elections Network (Fafen), the election monitoring association that PTI Chairman Imran Khan has quoted several times in the last 12 months, has issued a recent report titled, ‘Political Parties’ Petitions with Election Tribunals’ dated August, 2014 and available at www.fafen.org .

The report on Page 11 shows that out of the 58 seats where Imran Khan feels election rigging took place, only 30 are of the National Assembly. Out of those 30 seats, only 20 are those which the PML-N won.

The candidate who has at least 172 seats out of 342 National Assembly seats gets to be the prime minister and forms the government. In the 2012 elections, including minority and women’s reserved seats, the PTI had independently won 34 seats and the PML-N had won 170 seats. Nineteen independent candidates also joined the PML-N taking the total score to 189.

Even if all the 20 seats of National Assembly where Imran Khan believes the PML-N rigged the elections were turned and given to PTI, PTI’s score would rise only by 20 seats and the PML-N score would decrease by 20.

That means the PML-N majority would decrease from 189 to 169 and PTI minority would increase from 34 to 54. This would have no significant impact to the PML-N and the PTI as far as mandate and government making is concerned. The PTI would still lose to PML-N by 115 seats.

However, this analysis is assuming that all 20 National Assembly seats the PTI thinks were rigged in favour of PML-N were decided in court of law in favour of Imran Khan. There are still 11 NA based PTI petitions pending out of 30, but so far Election Tribunals have rejected most of Imran Khan’s rigging complaints.

Imran Khan has also been giving the wrong impression that government had not opened four National Assembly seats as the government has no control or say over the Election Commission of Pakistan and Election Tribunals. However, critics argue that if the government had gone to the Supreme Court to ask what can legally been done on the PTI request for opening four seats it would have gotten some answer. Another option, critics mention, is for PML-N to have resigned from those four seats held new elections there. The PML-N, however, did not opt for legal or political option in a timely manner. Imran Khan on 19th May 2014 at 8pm with Fariha Idrees, on 3rd July 2014 on Kal Tak with Javed Chaudhry, and on 12th August 2013 with Kamran Shahid demanded for a judicial commission under the Supreme Court chief justice.

On 13th of August the prime minister finally agreed to form the Supreme Court Judicial Commission to confirm whether or not 2013 elections mandate was systematically rigged to support one party at the expense of the other.