First it was the PML-N supreme leader, ousted prime minister Mian Nawaz Sharif who cast doubts on the upcoming general elections, saying his party’s contest is not with the PPP co-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari or PTI Chairman Imran Khan, “but with the aliens.” Later, Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi regurgitated his leader’s remarks claiming the elections would be conducted by “the aliens.” Who the aliens might be, of course, is not lost on anyone. In fact, Mian Sahib and daughter Maryam Nawaz have repeatedly been blaming the military establishment for his ouster and their ongoing legal troubles in the Panama Papers corruption case.

But in his surprising comments during an interview with a private TV channel, the PTI Chairman directly accused the Army of helping Nawaz Sharif win the 2013 elections. He even named an ex-MI official, Brigadier Muzaffar Ali Ranjha (retd) – at present head of the Anti-Corruption Establishment in Punjab — who, he alleged, personally supervised the elections to ensure the PML-N emerged as the single largest party in the country. However, he did not go as far as to accuse the then Army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, saying “I don’t know whether or not it was decision made at the top level” asserting also that the Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa is a “neutral Army chief.” Brigadier Ranjha has vehemently rejected Imran Khan’s allegation. Considering that the PTI Chairman had staged a protracted sit-in demanding the then prime minister’s resignation on rigging charges, others are rightly raising the question, why did he wait so long to tell the story he is now telling? Perhaps, he has started to believe rumours that a new process of political engineering is in the works to create a hung parliament so that whosoever forms the next government can be controllable. There is no apparent reason, though, to give a serious consideration to such rumours.

The doubts expressed by the two main rivals about the fairness of the elections seem to arise from the unsavoury past. Unfortunately, politicians share some of the blame for causing distortions in the democratic process. One irrefutable example came out of the Asghar Khan case. In his affidavit he submitted before the apex court, former ISI chief Lt-Gen Asad Durrani (retd) presented a long list of names, including Nawaz Sharif’s, who took money from the military intelligence agency in 1990 to form an alliance with the sole objective of ensuring the PPP did not return to power. The ‘heavy mandate’ the Nawaz League obtained in the 1997 elections is also suspected to be the outcome of political engineering. After the 1999 military coup, the two major political players, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, having learned a lesson, decided not to pull one another down signing the 2006 Charter of Democracy. Nonetheless, politicians still do not trust one another, which is obvious from their insistence at the time of the last elections, even in some hotly contested by-elections, that the polls be supervised by the Army. Also, the national census was delayed for far too long only because the soldiers were busy doing their duty elsewhere. In order to confront unwanted interventions, real or perceived, politicians must try and build trust among themselves.