At long last, let the games begin

This has turned out to be quite an important week for us, in an environment where many among us had started going around in circles, talking about the same things over and over again: will elections take place, are we looking at a level playing field, who is meeting whom and why, ad nauseam – only to spiral back to the question of if and when elections will take place.

Hats off to the Supreme Court for putting an end to this dizzying merry-go-round. Through a quick order, written, edited and despatched under the SC’s direct supervision, the court directed the ECP to immediately meet with the President and ensure that an agreed upon election date was submitted to the SC in writing within 24 hours. What followed is a great example of what can happen in Pakistan even if one person in authority has his head and heart in the right place.

The ECP, so far seeking protection from a law subservient to the Constitution to sidestep a constitutional obligation, ran helter-skelter to the presidency, and “respectfully suggested” that February 11 may be the most suitable date for the next elections. Fearing a deadlock, our suave and articulate attorney general, who had so far backed the ECP’s stance – that it wasn’t bound to consult the president for an election date – spent the entire evening shuttling between the ECP and the presidency to ensure that the SC’s directive was complied with.

And hey presto, we have a date for the next elections – February 8 – which the SC says is to be considered as written in stone. How simple was that?

Along with the SC’s landmark role in cleaning up this sordid affair, we have something equally important to celebrate. The court’s directive had as much to do with ensuring elections at the earliest as with the acrimonious sentiment between various tiers of the state.

It doesn’t matter if the president belongs to a party that has fallen from grace. It doesn’t matter what forced the PDM government to notify a census, against which most of its components had been protesting, in such an unholy rush. It doesn’t matter what anyone is saying about the evenness of the electoral field. What matters is the future, and the only way to ensure that we move towards it is to stop wallowing in the sins of our past.

The SC has clearly shown these passive aggressive combatants a way out of the hole that they have dug for themselves, a hole that has little to offer Pakistan except for more bitterness and rancour. This is not to say that the SC’s intervention has whiffed away all the pungency from our political discourse. Muck will continue to fly, for sure, as we head into campaign weeks early next year, and PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari’s latest outburst that he will not let Mian Nawaz Sharif become the next PM is indicative of its acridness.

For a man of his political acumen, combined with the shadiness in which he has been forced to operate for most of his political career, he is very unlikely to prematurely publicise anything that is truly close to his heart. It must therefore be treated as indicative of his reading of how the polling day is likely to come to a close.

There are clear indications that our well-wishers are keen to have PTI in the playing field, sans its captain of course, if only to lend some desperately needed legitimacy to what is the largest administrative and logistical exercise for any country barring war. But they seem equally clear that no single political party can be allowed to claim an outright win, a bitter lesson from the 2018 elections. And that may help explain Mr Zardari’s confidence.

In what is already promising to be a hard fought election with a vague outcome, there will be weeks of tense negotiations, driven more by political expediency than principles, before we see an elected government in office. The hardest hit, of course, will be the ones who are already convinced that their recently returned leader is going to be the next PM, a scenario that, at least for now, is as unlikely as a clear mandate for any one party.

Not quite the scenario that may be conducive to a less acrimonious political culture, is it? But then, as they say, there are many ways to make an omelette but none to unmake it. The electoral dish currently on the table seems to be the only one on the menu, and one that we will need to live with in the foreseeable future. And even one sane voice in the cacophony about to go on air may be all that is required to prevent permanent aural damage. So, thank you Chief Justice. Thank you for being there.