Ayaz Sadiq

All rise for the Speaker of the House

They say that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

Well, the alumni of Aitchison College, our very own Eton, are doing plenty of battling. Except it is with each other, and not in far away Belgium, but right here, on the streets of Pakistan.

Back in the ’14 dharna, Imran Khan, an Aitchisonian, flanked by Pervez Khattak, two years his senior at school, waged war in Islamabad, against the Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar, his contemporary at college.

Another alumnus of the college, two years Khan’s junior, was one Ayaz Sadiq, who later on went to join the PTI. After developing differences with Khan, he joined the PML-N, which fielded him from NA-122, a Lahore constituency. He won from here, not only in ’08 and ’13, but also in the dark days of ’02, when the military had propped up the Q League everywhere against the N League.

Ayaz Sadiq went on to become Speaker of the National Assembly. Imran Khan, who in his hubris before the ’13 elections, had said he wouldn’t take the oath of prime minister from the then President Zardari, had to eat humble pie when he took the oath of MNA from the man who personally defeated him in NA-122.

Whether it was this personal slight or Aitchisonian baggage, Khan included the constituency amongst the four that he wanted “opened”. No one knew quite what that meant, since the law is very clear on such matters: if you have issues with an election, go to the election commission’s tribunal. The latter was not only the fastest moving tribunal in the country’s history, but it had also deseated more ruling party legislators than any such tribunal in the country’s history. Yet, the PTI still found it inadequate. The rest, of course, is history. The dharna happened. A judicial commission was formed. The commission ruled in the PML-N’s favour, much to the PTI’s chagrin.

And, after the judicial commission ruled in the League’s favour, the election commission’s tribunal — the same one that the PTI had claimed was of compromised integrity – nullified the NA-122 election results on a technicality and ordered for a by-election to take place.

Though both sides spent a lot of money on the by-election, it was the PTI’s candidate, Aleem Khan, who really pulled out all the stops when it came to campaign expenditure. The PTI still lost, though by a narrow margin of around four thousand votes.

Truth be told, even if the PTI had won, would it really have “proved” that there was something wrong with the ’13 polls? A full two years had passed since the polls, and the sentiment of a constituency can change. After all, the PTI lost Imran Khan’s vacated Peshawar seat to the ANP only a couple of months after the election. Is that to be taken as proof that Khan didn’t win fair and square there?

But that sort of argument wouldn’t have worked, least of all for the spirited supporters of the PTI. In private circles, however, most of them would also admit that in a party-less election, they would have voted for the mild-mannered speaker, rather than the alleged land-grabber that their party had fielded.

It was a high-stakes, symbolic election. And Sardar Ayaz Sadiq came through.