Pakistan after General Elections: Options for India by Amb. Gautam Bambawale, Praneet Shukla, Manasi Pendharkar

Elections in Pakistan have always been a sensitive and controversial subject in many ways. Since the time of General Ayub Khan in 1958, spanning all the way till General Musharraf in 1999, the country has seen 34 years of military dictatorship since its birth in 1947, marred with violent upheaval and disintegration of a so-called democratic process (Jehangir, 2023). Considering today’s context, Nawaz Sharif is expected to make a triumphal re-entry to Pakistan politics due to the strong underlying support for him and his party from the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Gen Asim Munir (Javed & Drury, 2024). The elections, originally planned to be held within the 90-day window post-dissolution of the Shehbaz Sharif government in August 2023, saw delays well beyond the stipulated time and now scheduled for 8 February 2024 (Livemint, 2024). As in the past, the Army is the one pulling the strings in Pakistan, but the fact that they have had to turn back to Nawaz Sharif who had been hounded out in 2017, indicates the utter paucity of political options left open to the Pak Army after their short-lived tryst with Imran Khan.