Daily Times

It seems, increasingly with time, that you just need to know the result of any particular election to know how different political parties are going to react to it. It’s no surprise, for example, that Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf’s (PTI’s) victory in the AJK election has opposition parties spitting venom and accusing the winner of “hijacking the election”, “shameless rigging”, and all that. While both Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) are unhappy with the final result, the latter has gone a step further and rejected it altogether. PML-N Vice President Maryam Nawaz has categorically said that she rejects this result and “I did not accept the 2018 results either or acknowledge this fake government.”

Yet it is not very clear how that changes anything for her or for her party workers. Denying an official result is, in all fairness, the political equivalent of burying one’s head in the sand. A much better approach would be accepting the reality of the way people vote at any given point in time and, in case of a loss, identifying and correcting whatever went wrong. And the simple fact of the matter is that ever since the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) fizzled out the opposition has been in utter disarray. Half the time they blame the government for all their own problems and the other half they are at each other’s throats. Right throughout the AJK campaign neither PPP nor PML-N could resist the urge to play down the other, even though it played right into the hands of PTI; with very obvious results.

Perhaps PML-N’s senior leaders should advise their vice president to take a long, hard inward look and do something about the indecisiveness and lack of a properly defined hierarchy within the party. Of late PML-N has clearly been divided into two groups, one led by party president, Shahbaz Sharif, and the other by the heir apparent and VP, Maryam Nawaz. And, to make things even worse, there have even been times when they have contradicted each other’s positions and statements. They have already wasted more than half this electoral cycle by refusing to accept this reality. Rejecting the writing on the wall may stir the party rank and file but it is unlikely to do much to fetch votes when it’s time for the next general election, which is not very far away. Therefore, the sooner some opposition parties shed this predictability, especially about what they are going to say every time they lose an election, the better for them and their diehard followers. *