This past week, the Supreme Court’s ‘Constitutional Bench’ — itself still under constitutional challenge — decided to strip the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI), the single-largest party in Parliament, of its reserved seats.

It also went one further: it thought to hand those seats to the ruling coalition. Thus, for the first time in our history, nearly two dozen seats were gifted to the same parties that had lost at the polls.

To break this down further: the public’s votes were doled out to those they had voted against. The result is an unelected ‘unity’ regime being handed a two-thirds majority, the very haul it needs to mangle the Constitution in earnest.

We know this to be true because of the disaster that has been the 26th Amendment — around last fall, the coalition parties were smarting from their lack of numbers. It was only after months of cajoling or coercing opposition lawmakers that the amendment could be passed — that too as a watered-down version of an even more atrocious bill.

But after this latest verdict, the Constitutional Bench has served that Constitution on a platter to the rejected parties: they can now reshape our legal order all by themselves.

This is because the PTI’s reserved seats are what tipped the scale: to meet the magic number of 224 seats (in a 336-strong assembly), the regime, at roughly 213 altogether, needed another 11 to get over the line.

They now have those and more: up for grabs were the PTI’s 22 reserved seats, and the coalition got all of them; 14 to PML-N, 5 to PPP, and 3 to fence-sitter JUI-F.

In sum, amendments can pass easily now, regardless of whether their authors were voted in or not. If the Constitution Bench’s view is anything to go by, democracy is besides the point.

Reserved seats have a long and storied past in Pakistan — they were one of founding father Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s core demands, put to British rulers as well as the Hindu majority.

And with reason: to ensure historically underrepresented groups get a say in Parliament. That’s why, of the total 70 reserved seats in the National Assembly at present, 60 have been earmarked for women; 10 for religious minorities.

Given that equal opportunity doesn’t always mean equal participation, these candidates have been shielded from the rough and tumble of a direct election. They are instead allotted seats from pre-existing party lists after the election is over, in proportion to how many general seats their party has won.

It follows that the more general seats a party wins, the more the reserves that fall in its share.

That is, until the Constitutional Bench’s ruling: having turned that formula on its head, the Court has shown it’s better to lose with the system than win against it.

Take, for example, the absurd outcomes trickling out of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: in a province the PTI swept last year, the PML-N, PPP, and JUI-F are now eyeing more seats in reserve than what they’d won in the general election. The PPP, for example, hopes to bag two reserves — despite securing just one seat in the actual polls.

Apart from women and minorities, the Constitutional Bench seems to have created a third category: losers that serve democracy’s latest derailment.

It begins, as so much of this judicial surrender does, with former Chief Justice of Pakistan Qazi Faez Isa. More specifically, with Isa’s infamous bat symbol verdict, yanking away the PTI’s electoral symbol right before the polls. Punishment, per the Isa Court, for not holding intra-party........

© Dawn Prism