Will the govt’s latest attempt to ‘sap’ PTI’s strength survive in court?

There is little likelihood for the new law to be interpreted in the manner it is intended and affect the composition of assemblies.

At the same time, the Constitution sets down a specific number of seats in the national as well as provincial assemblies. In the former, for instance, there are 60 seats reserved for women and 10 for religious minorities in accordance with Article 51(3). These seats are required by the Constitution to be allocated to parties proportionate to their representation in the assembly along provincial lines in accordance with Article 51(6) as detailed in the following paragraphs.

In the instant case, where the SIC with 80 seats had been denied its proportionate share of the reserved seats, the rest of the parties in assemblies had to be allocated more seats than they were entitled to because the total number of members, for instance, in the NA cannot be less than 326 as stipulated in Article 51(3).

Therefore, by keeping the PTI/ SIC out of the contest for the reserved seats quota, other parties were enabled by the ECP to obtain more seats than the constitutional scheme would allow. To reach the logical conclusion of completing the House, the ECP sought additional names for reserved seats after the time frame had lapsed.

This means that a violation of the statute — the Elections Act, 2024 — has already been committed by the ECP. Besides, it appears that a serious violation of Article 51, which prescribes the scheme of distribution of seats in the NA on provincial basis, has also taken place.

Under clause 51(3), women are to be nominated for reserved seats according to the number of seats allocated to each province through a proportional representation system on the basis of the total number of general seats secured by each political party from the province concerned in the National Assembly. Here, the words “proportional representation” on provincial basis are the key to the implementation of this constitutional provision. It also means that none of the parties can be allocated more than their share of reserved seats.

As discussed earlier, the SC majority verdict has held that the PTI was a political party prior to the election day and remains a political party post-election. Therefore, it may be concluded that the denial of status of a political party leading to the PTI’s returned candidates joining the SIC was an irregularity, which has to be examined on the touchstone of the Constitution that guarantees the right to association.

Will the SC verdict not be based on all these aspects? Will the court not take into account all these and many other aspects when it scrutinises the Amendment Act together with or separately independent of the issue of implementation of its order of July 12?

To hope otherwise would be living in fool’s paradise. Albeit, a lot will depend on how political events unfold and how the SC’s internal politics, and the power dynamics of the judges’ committee meant to form benches shapes the allocation of cases to different benches in the coming weeks.

What then is it that the government actually hopes to achieve with this legislation? Perhaps, the government simply hopes to buy time to achieve something other than strictly in the legal and constitutional domain. The court in its short order had given a schedule of sorts to the ECP to implement its directions by August 6 — the same day the bill was rushed through Parliament with the clear aim to have a legal basis for delaying the implementation of the order.

Whatever it may be, there’s little likelihood for the Amendment Act, even if it survives the court’s scrutiny, to be interpreted in the manner it is intended and affect the composition of assemblies contrary to the court’s verdict pronounced in the reserved seats case.