PAKISTAN'S ELECTIONS ARE BEING RIGGED BY THE MILITARY

Pakistan’s powerful military has adopted Putin’s playbook by keeping the popular former Prime Minister Imran Khan out of the elections for the foreseeable future.

- JOHN DOBSON

It’s the oldest trick in the book. If you hold power or political leverage in acountry and you don’t want a rival to become president or prime minister, you simply have to make sure that he or she is not on the ballot paper. As simple as that. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been doing it for years. Any potential rival to Putin has either met their maker before time or jailed for an indefinite period. Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Putin and a potential political rival, was gunned down in 2015 in one of the most protected places in Moscow, the edge of Red Square. The popular opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was poisoned by Novichok nerve agent in his underpants, smeared there by Russia’s security service, FSB, according to a later investigation. Having survived the assassination attempt, he was kept off the ballot paper by a series of flawed allegations which have kept him in jail ever since.

It now appears that Pakistan’s powerful military has adopted Putin’s playbook by keeping the popular former Prime Minister Imran Khan out of elections for the foreseeable future. Khan was ousted as prime minister in April 2022 following a parliamentary vote of noconfidence, having fallen out with the military over senior army appointments. He fiercely maintains that this was hatched by the army in collusion with Washington. The cricketer-turnedpolitician will not be on the ballot paper on Thursday because he will be behind bars during the election serving a sentence which he and his supporters decry as “politically motivated” and “a conspiracy”. A Gallup Poll taken in January, just a month before the election, revealed that Khan remains the most popular politician at the national level.