A damning Commonwealth report exposes how one of history’s most brazen electoral manipulations crushed the will of millions
The numbers told a story the establishment refused to hear. Ninety-two seats won by independent candidates—each one carrying the hopes of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf supporters, each one a defiant vote cast in the shadow of intimidation. Yet democracy, that fragile promise written in constitutions and whispered in polling booths, was strangled before it could breathe.
More than eighteen months after Pakistan’s 2024 general election, the Commonwealth Observer Group has finally spoken what millions already knew in their bones: the election was a carefully orchestrated betrayal of the people’s will.
The report, released with damning clarity, documents how Imran Khan’s party faced systematic dismantling. Their crime? Winning too much support. Their punishment? Being erased from the ballot, forced to contest as faceless independents, stripped of their unifying symbol—the cricket bat that millions recognized and rallied behind.
“Consistently limited,” the observers wrote, their diplomatic language barely concealing the ugliness beneath. But those dry words represent something far more visceral: homes raided in the dead of night, campaign offices shuttered by force, supporters vanishing into detention without explanation, their families left to wonder and wait.
Imran Khan himself sits in prison, facing over two hundred charges his party insists are nothing more than political persecution dressed in legal robes. Days before the election, convictions landed like calculated blows—three separate cases, three separate verdicts, each one timed to maximum effect. The Commonwealth observers noted this with concern. Concern seems an inadequate word for what resembles a judicial execution of political opposition.
The playing field wasn’t just unlevel—it was deliberately tilted, greased, booby-trapped. The courts made decisions that shaped outcomes. The media received its instructions: don’t say his name. Broadcasters complied, referring only to “the Chair of PTI,” as if speaking Imran Khan’s name might conjure something dangerous. Perhaps it would have—the dangerous idea that people have the right to choose their leaders.
On election night, as votes were counted and results compiled, mobile phone networks went dark across the nation. In that manufactured silence, discrepancies appeared between polling station tallies and official constituency results. Numbers changed. Winners became losers. The will of voters transformed into something more convenient for those who wield power beyond ballot boxes.
State television told its own story, lavishing coverage on the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Pakistan People’s Party while relegating PTI-affiliated independents to the margins. The establishment’s preferred narrative played on loop while the people’s choice was rendered invisible.
The cruel irony cuts deepest here: despite everything—the arrests, the disappearances, the media blackout, the symbol stripped away, the courts weaponized, the night of digital darkness—PTI-backed independents still won more seats than any other group. Ninety-two victories born from sheer determination and the stubborn refusal of ordinary Pakistanis to surrender their voice.
Yet those ninety-two seats could not form a government. The two establishment parties, despite their distant second and third-place finishes, despite falling far short of the 133 seats needed for majority, somehow cobbled together a coalition. Shehbaz Sharif returned to the prime minister’s office, not through the people’s mandate, but through political maneuvering that made a mockery of the votes counted that February night.
The Commonwealth report speaks of “fundamental political rights” restricted, of freedom of association and assembly curtailed, of journalists working under a “culture of impunity” that breeds self-censorship. It notes how these violations “impinged on the credibility, transparency and inclusiveness of the electoral process.”
But statistics and diplomatic phrasing cannot capture the human cost: the activists who disappeared, the families torn apart, the voters who stood in line knowing their courage might be punished, who cast their ballots anyway because democracy demands such faith, even when that faith is rewarded with betrayal.
Syed Zulfikar Bukhari, Khan’s close aide, called it “the most rigged and fraudulent election in Pakistan’s history.” Strong words, yet the Commonwealth’s own findings seem to validate them. The real scandal may be not just the rigging itself, but the eighteen months of silence that followed—eighteen months during which the international community’s “independent observers” sat on evidence of democracy’s murder.
“Why is democracy not important to them in Pakistan?” Bukhari asked after the report’s release. It’s a question that echoes beyond Pakistan’s borders, challenging every institution that claims to champion democratic values while watching them systematically dismantled.
In the end, this is a story about power—who wields it, who challenges it, and what happens when those in control fear the people they’re meant to serve. It’s about millions of Pakistanis who dared to vote their conscience despite knowing the game was rigged, who believed that their collective voice might somehow overwhelm the machinery of suppression.
They were right and wrong simultaneously. Right that they won the election. Wrong that winning would matter.
The Commonwealth report is now public, its findings undeniable. But for the voters whose ballots were discounted, whose candidates were imprisoned, whose democratic rights were trampled—vindication eighteen months late offers cold comfort. Democracy delayed, in their case, was democracy denied.
And Imran Khan remains in prison, his supporters scattered, his party banned from using its symbol, while the establishment’s coalition governs a country whose people chose otherwise. The bats are gone from the ballot. But the people remember what they symbolized—and more importantly, they remember that they were never truly allowed to choose.
