In the crosshairs

Former Prime Minister Imran Khan continues his love-hate relationship with the establishment amid his long-running effort to malign ECP and its chairman. Imran is now claiming that ‘secret hands’ are using ECP to try and rig the next election. That is actually an evolution from his previous claim — just before winning almost every Punjab Assembly bye-election — that the vote is already rigged against him. This would imply that the ‘secret hands’ are terrible at rigging and therefore not a concern, or that Imran was creating a false narrative in case the PTI candidates lost.

As we have seen in the US and elsewhere, such populist messaging works, sometimes so well that it can survive even the strongest evidence to the contrary. Former US President Donald Trump’s election denial has been discredited at every level. His legal team and top spokespersons have been unable to provide any proof to back up his claims, yet his supporters and, at least publicly, most of his party refuse to accept reality. Similarly, millions of people still believe Imran’s foreign conspiracy narrative almost entirely on the basis of blind faith in Imran. He has already been trying to rewrite history regarding the foreign funding case, claiming that PTI had nothing to hide and that ECP had some ulterior motive to delay the verdict, all while ignoring the fact that his party has filed several legal challenges to keep the case from proceeding and, when these failed, to keep the report from being made public.

He also recently repeated his claim that ECP was in cahoots with the opposition to block the introduction of electronic voting machines (EVM), even though nobody has tried to outrightly ban the devices. Opposition to EVMs has centred around testing them first on a limited scale to ensure they are secure before allowing a nationwide launch. This is an important consideration as several hackers around the world have been able to tamper with EVMs, and many countries that introduced the devices have gone back to paper ballots or other forms of offline voting after detecting security risks.

PTI’s defence of foreign funding has also been problematic, to say the least. While underscoring PTI’s perfectly legal act of receiving funding from overseas Pakistanis, he also admitted that, “Receiving funds from foreign countries or companies which can influence your policies is foreign funding.” Interestingly, no one in his party has addressed details in the ECP documents and the recent Financial Times story, which show that Imran received money from and, once elected Prime Minister, actively lobbied for favourable treatment for the businesses of Arif Naqvi, even after his arrest and subsequent conviction on fraud charges. There has also been no solid answer to the British newspaper’s claim that a Middle Eastern royal helped bankroll PTI, which would be a clear case of prohibited funding, even if it was done in a personal capacity.

If the party was acting above board, much of this embarrassment could have been avoided if PTI only accepted money from individuals. After all, under the laws of most countries, including Pakistan, a foreign registered company is a foreign company, no matter the nationality of its owners. Abraaj, for example, comes to mind.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 7^th, 2022.

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