Pakistan Bans Imran Khan’s Name, Party, and Cricket Bat Logo from Election

The government of Pakistan banned former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) from using its distinctive cricket bat logo on Monday, which effectively means PTI candidates cannot appear on ballots.

The Pakistani government has not been subtle about eliminating any chance that Khan, a radical Islamist, might make a comeback in the February election. The state has already thrown Khan in jail, tossed out his nomination paperwork, and barred the media from saying his name.

The logo ban is crucial because in Pakistan, party logos appear on ballot papers alongside the names — and since about 40 percent of the Pakistani population is functionally illiterate, the logos are the only way for parties to run slates of candidates.

Pakistani elections include thousands of candidates running under dozens of party umbrellas, plus independent candidates who receive their own logos. PTI’s highly recognizable logo has been a major political asset. The logo incorporates a cricket bat, a reference to Khan’s career as a star cricket player.

“Three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s party uses a tiger, while the party of Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the son of slain premier Benazir Bhutto, uses an arrow. Symbols available to independents include a donkey cart and an ironing board,” the Deccan Herald noted on Tuesday, making Pakistani elections sound like the world’s most depressing game of Monopoly.

The leading player in that game has already gone directly to jail without collecting $200. Khan launched his comeback campaign immediately after he was ousted as prime minister in a landmark vote of no confidence in April 2022. He declared the no-confidence vote to be a U.S.-orchestrated plot to get rid of him and embarked on an Islamist populist barnstorming campaign, during which he was shot in the leg by a would-be assassin.

Khan was dogged by over a hundred allegations of corruption from his time as prime minister, including an especially troublesome case in which he was accused of breaking Pakistani ethics laws by improperly keeping expensive gifts from foreigners. Khan and his supporters say all of these charges were fabricated as political hit jobs by his enemies.

Khan developed a habit of skipping court appearances, which he said was justified because the courtrooms were haunted by government assassins who would kill him if he showed up for his hearings.

Unmoved by this argument, the courts slapped him with mounting penalties and finally ordered his arrest, but his supporters closed ranks around his house in Lahore and physically prevented the police from entering. This led to a politically disastrous attempt to arrest him by sending a paramilitary commando squad into a courtroom to seize Khan during one of the court appearances he did choose to attend.

Khan’s supporters rioted in the streets after he was arrested, damaging some military property in the process. The nearly all-powerful Pakistani military successfully pushed for Khan and PTI to be banned from elections after the riots, even though polls showed Khan was among the most popular candidates in Pakistan and quite possibly the frontrunner in the February 2024 election.

Pakistani Chief Justice Qazi Faez announced the final decision on the cricket bat logo ban in a late-night televised event on Saturday, prompting immediate condemnation from PTI. The technical justification for the ban, first imposed by Pakistan’s electoral commission in December, was that PTI did not conduct appropriate internal party elections, which is a requirement for appearing on general election ballots.

“PTI cannot go into elections as a party, due to be held February 8 this year. This ruling, by far, is the worst decision impacting millions of voters of a party that enjoys the most popular public support. A sad day for democracy,” PTI said in a statement.

PTI announced that its candidates would run as independents to avoid the party ban, but preventing it from running as an organized party is a clear handicap.

“Excluding a major political party from elections on technical grounds will destabilize democracy. With this decision, the transparency of the general elections in 2024 is likely to become more controversial,” the independent Human Rights Council of Pakistan said in response to the court decision.

Other observers denounced the court for “disenfranchising” millions of PTI supporters and subverting Pakistani jurisprudence with a highly questionable court ruling on technicalities, although some conceded there are good reasons to be suspicious of how PTI conducts its internal affairs.

PTI voters were all the more enraged because Khan’s major rival for the election, former three-term prime minister Nawaz Sharif, was himself banned from politics and sent into exile until October – at which time the military apparently decided he was their best candidate, and he was cleared of all remaining corruption charges that would have kept him out of the election.

The same Supreme Court that banned PTI’s logo also lifted Nawaz Sharif’s lifetime ban on running for office last week. The Court decided lifetime bans “abridge the fundamental right of citizens to contest elections,” but left temporary bans in place – such as the one preventing Imran Khan from running this year.

Khan’s lawyer Intazar Hussain Panjutha described last week’s Supreme Court ruling against the lifetime ban on Sharif as “the death of law and the constitution.”

Khan himself said on Tuesday that Sharif was running the election like a rigged cricket match, in which he had “two umpires” working for him, the courts and the military, and one of those crooked umpires sidelined Khan with a lousy “no-ball” penalty.

Khan said the election is proceeding according to the “London Plan,” his long-standing conspiracy theory that the Pakistani military and Sharif dynasty are coordinating with foreign governments to keep him out of office.

However, Khan told his supporters not to despair, because while his Plan A and Plan B for returning to office have been thwarted, a surprise “Plan C” will soon be executed. He did not explain how Plan C would work, but other PTI officials have said Plan B would have involved a fusion ticket deal with one of PTI’s offshoot parties to get back on the ballot with a cricket-related symbol, and Plan C would be running PTI candidates as independents.

“They are still afraid because people cannot be stopped,” Khan declared on Tuesday.