Pakistan revisits history, faces Mujibur Rehman moment after stolen mandate
Ex Pakistan PM Imran Khan
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, February 16: Jamiat Ulema Islam’s Fazlurehman’s candidate Mufti Kifayat after the Pakistan election result issued a grim warning amid power plays for the formation of the government in Islamabad. He said that Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) lost the election. Sharif should graciously accept his defeat, said Kifayat, who added that he too had been defeated in the elections.
Shehbaz Sharif is set to become Prime Minister of Pakistan. Nawaz Sharif is now retiring from active politics. His daughter Maryam Sharif will take charge of the Punjab province. Bilawal Bhutto of the Pakistan People’s Party will also get the suitable role in the government to be formed.
Kifayat, however, had warned that the political leaders of Pakistan and the establishment should not commit the same mistake that they had committed decades ago. Kifayat said: “Decades ago, Mujibur Rehman had won 107 seats in the national election. But he was not allowed to form the government. The result was the dismemberment of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. The same mistake should not be repeated.”
The Pakistani military establishment appears to have staged an alliance of political parties to form the coalition government after the Imran Khan’s PTI-backed independent candidates won the national elections. Khan continues to be in a jail. The US and the UK have officially called for probes into the allegations of the electoral malpractices in Pakistan.
Absar Alam of Samaa TV posed three questions ahead of the government formation in a post on the social media platform X, asking “What to do with the clear mandate – specially when people have been flashing their democratic principles and philosophies for decades; What if the PTI goes berserk and trigger unrest leading to a civil war like situation when we all very well know they won’t accept the usurpation of their fresh mandate; and do the state and political parties have will and balls to crush them with force?”
Pakistan’s leading journalist Cyril Almeida also said that “guerrilla politics won (the) PTI the election… it won’t work in the assemblies”. He added that “short of shooting PTI voters at polling stations, the boys did everything”. The boys are loose terms to describe the Pakistani military establishment. He noted that the “PTI margin of victory is astounding”.
Strategic thinker, Major General (Retd) Shashi Bhushan Asthana in a post on the post-poll analysis in Pakistan noted that “in 2024 elections the establishment has smartly played the game differently to ensure that that every stakeholder remains well below the threshold level of claiming simple majority to form the government”. He argued that the verdict “gives opportunity to the establishment to stack numbers for chosen prime minister from behind the scene, thus selecting a puppet who can be displayed as elected for global consumption, and displaced by the establishment, whenever he becomes uncomfortable to it.”
Asthana argued that the current political scene in Pakistan “has been so masterminded that no civil leader can challenge the power of its Army, which will retain all levers of power in foreseeable future.”
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