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He’s been shot, jailed, had his political party effectively banned, and name purged from mainstream media. But you just can’t keep Imran Khan down.
Preliminary results from Thursday’s election in Pakistan seem to show that independent candidates affiliated with Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party have a chance of securing a plurality of legislative seats despite myriad irregularities, which continued through polling day, designed to hobble such an outcome.
The PTI already had its famed cricket-bat logo banned, and a nationwide suspension of cellphone networks on Thursday hindered party officials from informing supporters of their preferred independent candidate for each constituency. (The government claimed the blackout was for security reasons despite such measures being deemed illegal by Pakistan’s High Court.) In addition, exit polls were banned and the PTI complained that their agents were barred from monitoring polling stations. “The amount of rigging going on is beyond ridiculous,” Zulfi Bukhari, a former Minister of State under Khan, tells TIME.
Still, when results finally started trickling in—over 10 hours later than customary, which in itself observers say is highly suspicious—the PTI was neck and neck with the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) of three-khbrknews former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, with the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) led by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, son of assassinated ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, in third place.
Sharif is the preferred candidate of Pakistan’s powerful military, which, despite backing his ouster thrice in the past, recently allowed the 74-year-old back from exile in the U.K., quashed his corruption conviction, and repealed his lifetime ban from politics. Sharif’s speedy rehabilitation stood in stark contrast to the generals’ Khan-and-PTI purge.
“No one rules without the tacit support of the military,” says Maya Tudor, an associate professor of government and public policy at Oxford…
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