NA-154 — Supreme Court order

One of the reasons for granting stay order seems lack of preparation of PTI lawyer when it came to arguing the case

The Supreme Court has suspended the election tribunal’s verdict which unseated the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) lawmaker, Siddique Baloch, from the National Assembly constituency NA-154 (Lodhran-1) and placed a stay order on the upcoming by-election. There had previously been jubilation in the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) ranks whose candidate, Jahangir Tareen, was defeated by Mr Baloch in the 2013 elections.



The tribunal decision was seen as a vindication of the PTI position. The PTI was contending that the result was rigged and the election tribunal supported that claim — only to have the decision overturned, for the time being, and Mr Baloch restored. The PTI position now is that the PML-N had approached the Supreme Court because it was afraid of losing the by-election that would have been triggered had the tribunal decision stood. Thus far, all standard practice in the murky world of national politics.

One of the reasons for granting the stay order seems to be the lack of preparation of the PTI lawyer when it came to arguing the case. Notwithstanding that, everything appears to have hinged on the validity or otherwise of the academic achievements claimed by Mr Baloch, which the PTI and the tribunal both found to be in doubt. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, found that the academic credentials allegedly presented (or not, whether the tribunal actually saw the documents in question is unclear) to the tribunal were valid and that the decision of the tribunal had no validity in law. Furthermore, the Court found that the report submitted by NADRA to the tribunal had said clearly that the polls were held normally and there were no corrupt or illegal practices. While a final decision on the case is yet to come, the order calls into question the competencies of not just the tribunal that examined the allegations of electoral misbehaviour at the NA-154 election, but any other tribunal to investigate events on Election Day 2013 as well. Although the Court has not directly said so in its order, the inference that may be drawn is that the PTI might have ended up making an unsupportable claim against a political opponent — not for the first time. Let us hope it has learnt a lesson, and limits frivolity to the dharna and not the courtroom.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st, 2015.

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