What do you do when you're the established power in a country but you realise that the new circus you brought into town suddenly has a ringmaster that can rival your own?
If you are in Pakistan, you start by engineering the downfall of your rival. In this case, you did this through a vote of no confidence against Imran Khan's government in April 2022.
What do you do when you've locked yourself into a do-or-die contest with a political party and its chairman? You make sure it can never happen again. You make allies out of everyone else and forge a coalition consisting of every political party that is threatened by Imran Khan.
Then you ignore the country's Supreme Court when it orders elections to be held in two provinces—of which the PTI had dissolved assemblies. To prove your point, the Election Commission argues, amongst other things, that there's an ongoing security operation and the government doesn't have the manpower necessary to assist with an election. You also tell everyone that we don't have the Rs20 billion needed to hold the elections because we're broke.
Then you arrest the guy.
You stop interacting with the Supreme Court altogether until a new chief justice takes over. You engineer the ECP into depriving Imran Khan's party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), of its bat symbol, effectively ending its campaigning in the run-up to an election that you decide can now happen because all the pieces are in place, all your allies have become eligible, and all the plans are in order. The new chief justice of the Supreme Court endorses the ECP's position, and you have your elections without your biggest opponent.
Even though the charge of fornication is never brought, the servant's peeping tom testimony is used to paint the couple as sinners in a conservative media landscape
Then, a further twist of the knife: over the course of the weeks leading up to the election, you have Imran Khan convicted through sham trials for selling gifts he received whilst he was your preferred PM; gifts, which almost every other PM has received and kept. You have him convicted for losing a confidential document, which it is, in fact, his constitutional prerogative to keep confidential. You convict him for revealing state secrets which are his to decide to keep or reveal as the constitutional chief executive of the state.
Then the coup de (dis)grace: you convict Imran Khan for marrying his wife within the time period of iddat, a mandatory minimum time period calculated by a woman's menstrual cycle which a woman must wait for between marriages in Islam. The marriage is consensual, between two willing adults. But that doesn't stop you from alleging that it is fraudulent, a statutory protection afforded for women who are tricked into marriages through suitors who misrepresent their status as single or who have used false identities. The woman involved promises that she has adhered personally to the separation period required because she divorced her husband before it was officially recorded. Yet the trial goes on to focus on whether or not it was medically possible for her to have done so.
Meanwhile, to stop everyone from ridiculing your actions, you decide to buy a Rs20 billion firewall to curate what everyone can and can't say online. The same Rs20 billion, which you didn't have to conduct an election. Before the firewall is even up, you decide to ban Twitter/X.
So now, a former prime minister is jailed for a consensual marriage with his wife on the basis of a complaint made by her former husband, who willingly and publicly parted ways with her and then enjoyed his privileged status as the former husband of Pakistan's First Lady for six years before deciding to complain. Notably, the ex-husband's complaint came immediately after his release from an arrest concerning alleged corrupt dealings.
Then, just when one may think it would be impossible for the situation to become any more farcical, a servant of the ex-husband testifies that Imran Khan had illicit relations with the woman he would later marry. How does he know this? He claims he saw them together by peeping at them through a keyhole. But, because you can't find three more witnesses, you cannot charge Imran Khan with fornication as a punishable offence, so you satisfy yourself by proceeding with the charge of unlawful marriage alone. Still, even though the charge of fornication is never brought, the servant's peeping tom testimony is used to paint the couple as sinners in a conservative media landscape.
Then, the tide turns. It turns out that despite the election symbol of Imran Khan and the PTI being absent, despite his party's main leadership being in jail, and despite there being an unofficial ban upon his party from doing anything even resembling campaigning, the people vote for him.
And just like that, the farce is exposed for what it is. One by one, the convictions against Imran Khan are questioned
The people vote, despite painting your rival as a thief, a traitor and a fornicator. They vote in anger, they vote in hope, they vote in disgust.
They vote in their millions. And then the engineering begins. Electoral Forms are tampered with, to the point of the statistically impossible. One constituency has more than 40% of its polling stations with votes counted ending in zeros. The odds of this happening randomly are one in a trillion. On Twitter/X, statistician Osama Khalyd observes that your chances of being eaten by a shark are one in 3.7 million. Your chances of being struck and killed by lightning are one in 1.9 million. Khalyd points out that you would have a better chance of being eaten by a shark whilst being struck by lightning (1 in 57 billion) than to get these poll numbers randomly.
Judges can no longer ignore this turning of the tide. They complain publicly of executive interference in their judicial work. More and more judges begin to resist.
And just like that, the farce is exposed for what it is. One by one, the convictions against Imran Khan are questioned. Thirteen members of the Supreme Court sit in full court, and reserved seats meant for women and minorities stolen by the ECP from Imran Khan and the PTI are given back to him. This is a critical moment because the seats improperly allotted to the current government would have given them the power to amend the Constitution itself. The chief justice, considered so critical, is left in a minority within the Supreme Court. The Constitution is safe.
And then, a district court judge sits in appeal of the farce that was the case of Imran Khan's supposedly unlawful marriage. And the conviction is overturned because it's 2024, and an irregularity in a marriage doesn't render it void and doesn't mean that it was fraudulent or criminal.
It's common sense. We forgot what that was for this past year in Pakistan, but we are beginning to remember again.