Pakistanis vote for ouster premier’s seat in Parliament

LAHORE: Pakistanis voted on Sunday in a by-election for the parliamentary seat in Lahore made vacant by the disqualification from public office of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
The two main candidates were Sharif’s wife, Kulsoom Nawaz, of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), and Dr. Yasmin Rashid from Imran Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI).
The NA-120 constituency, with 321,786 registered voters, is a stronghold of the ruling PML-N. The result will be declared on Monday.
Neither of the two women were able to vote. Kulsoom Nawaz is in London recovering from surgery and Dr. Yasmin is not registered in the constituency.
The two main parties turned the by-election into a referendum on the Supreme Court’s decision on July 28 to bar Sharif from public office.
The PML-N urged voters to express their support for Sharif through the ballot box, while the PTI asked them to reject a political leader linked to corruption by the court. The ruling party views itself as a populist movement, and losing the by-election would damage its position.
The allegations against Sharif stem from the Panama Papers, documents leaked in 2016 from the law firm Mossack Fonseca. They suggest that Sharif’s family owns millions of dollars worth of property and companies around the world through offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands.
After the Supreme Court verdict, Sharif and Finance Minister Ishaq Dar were summoned by the National Accountability Bureau, Pakistan’s anti-graft watchdog. They refused to appear, pending a hearing on their petitions of appeal to the Supreme Court to reconsider its verdict and withdraw references to corruption.
A five-member judicial bench rejected the petitions last Friday, “for reasons to be recorded later.”
Sharif’s party believes a conspiracy against the former prime minister, and not corruption charges, led to his dismissal. Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal said on Saturday that although they accepted the verdict, history would judge Sharif’s removal differently.
Anusha Rahman, the minister for information technology, said she was disappointed by the verdict. “Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification should have been reconsidered,” she said, because he had never been paid a salary by Capital FZE.
However, the political analyst Qamar Cheema told Arab News: “The Supreme Court had enough evidence, plus Nawaz Sharif and family did not provide sufficient evidence to vindicate themselves.”
Cheema said the PML-N was likely to make a comeback in the 2018 general election, but “Nawaz may try to politicize the Supreme Court” if he found himself cornered.