“Could not demonstrate that it had held internal party elections, much less transparent ones.” That is the finding on which Pakistan’s Supreme Court, on 13 January, restored the Election Commission’s order stripping Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf of its electoral symbol, the cricket bat it had used for a quarter of a century.
Twenty-six days later the country voted, and the candidates that party had endorsed appear to have won more National Assembly seats than anyone else. They did it without the party’s name and without its symbol, standing as independents.
This is a profile of that word. Not of the election, which is still being counted as this is written, and not of the men and women who won. Of the legal object they were obliged to become, which is a specific thing in Pakistani law with specific properties, and which turns out to carry a price that no vote count will show.
What an independent normally is
In most electoral systems an independent is what the word suggests: somebody contesting without a party, usually locally known, usually not many of them, usually not decisive.
The category exists because a system that required party membership to stand would be a system in which parties controlled entry to the legislature. So the law leaves a door open for the unaffiliated, and in ordinary conditions very few people walk through it.
What happened in Pakistan is that a party of national scale was put through that door in its entirety. Every candidate it had endorsed appeared on the ballot as an individual, with no shared label and, critically, no shared symbol.
Why the symbol is not decoration
A Pakistani ballot paper carries symbols beside the names, and the symbols are not a design flourish. They are how a substantial share of voters identify who they are voting for.
A party symbol is therefore a piece of national infrastructure that a party builds over decades. It appears on posters, on flags, on the sides of buses, in constituencies where the candidate’s name means nothing and the symbol means everything. It survives the candidate; it is the thing a voter is loyal to when they are not loyal to a local figure.
Strip it, and the party’s endorsement has to travel constituency by constituency instead. Each independent was allotted a different symbol from the general pool, so a voter who knew exactly whom they wished to support still had to learn which unfamiliar object represented that person on that particular sheet of paper. Observers warned at the time that this would confuse voters and would advantage the candidates running under intact party labels.
It appears not to have worked as predicted, which is the surprise of the week and not the subject of this piece.
The property that costs money
Here is the part of the object that does not appear in any result table.
The National Assembly is not composed only of directly elected members. Sixty seats are reserved for women and ten for non-Muslims, and those seventy are not contested. They are allocated to political parties in proportion to the general seats each party has won.
Independents are not a party. They win no share of seventy seats, because there is no party for the proportion to attach to.
So a bloc that wins the most directly elected seats in the country, while legally consisting of individuals, collects nothing from the reserved pool. Its rivals, who won fewer general seats but won them as parties, collect a proportional share of seventy that the largest bloc does not touch.
The three-day door
The law does provide a remedy, and the remedy is where this gets interesting, because it has a clock on it.
An independent who has won a seat may join a political party within three days of the official publication of the returned candidates’ names. Having joined, that member is counted in the party’s total for the purpose of allocating the reserved seats.
Read that carefully and the shape of the coming fortnight is visible. A bloc that ran as independents because it was denied a symbol can recover its share of the reserved seats only by collectively joining a party within three days. Any party. It need not be the one they were endorsed by, and in this case that party has no symbol and a chairman in prison.
Three days is not very long to move a large number of individually elected people into a single legal vehicle, particularly when each of them is, by construction, an individual with their own mandate. It is precisely long enough for other parties to make offers.
What the object was designed to do
It is worth resisting the reading that this was all built for this occasion. It was not.
The three-day rule and the proportional allocation exist to stop a legislature full of unattached members from making the reserved seats unallocatable, which is a real and boring administrative problem. The symbol requirement exists because ballots need symbols. The internal-elections requirement exists because parties that never hold internal elections are a genuine feature of the region’s politics.
Each component is defensible on its own and was in place long before January. What happened is that they were applied in sequence to one party, and the sequence produced an outcome that no single component was designed to produce: a bloc that can win an election and still be short of the seats that winning normally confers.
That is the thing worth naming. A system does not have to be built to exclude anyone in order to exclude them. It only has to have enough components, and a reason to apply them all at once.
What is not settled
As this is written the count is not complete. Results arrived slowly enough overnight to draw complaints, with the Election Commission citing communications problems, and no official gazette has been published.
Until it is, the three-day clock has not started, and every question that matters is downstream of a document that does not yet exist. Which party the independents join, whether they join as one bloc or several, what the reserved seats do to a total that currently looks like one thing and may resolve into another.
What can be said is narrow and it is enough. A large number of people have been elected to Pakistan’s National Assembly under a description that was chosen for them rather than by them, and that description has a cost attached which they will pay in a currency the ballot paper never mentioned. The votes are counted in constituencies. The seats are counted somewhere else.
