Editorial
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf has announced it will not contest the upcoming Azad Jammu and Kashmir elections, citing solidarity with Kashmiris and a protest against what it calls an unlevel playing field. The sentiment may be genuine. The strategy is not. Boycott is the oldest trick in the loser’s playbook, and history has never been kind to it.
Consider the logic. An election is not merely a contest, it is a claim on legitimacy. Walk away from that contest, and you do not punish your opponents, you crown them. You hand them the assembly, the ministries, and the narrative, all without a fight. Ask any student of Pakistani political history what boycotts have achieved, and the answer will be silence, absence, and irrelevance. PTI itself has lived this lesson before, in 2008, when its boycott of general elections left it watching from the sidelines while others shaped the decade.
Democratic participation is not a favour parties do for the state, it is the very oxygen of representative politics. A party that abstains does not defeat its rivals, it disarms itself. Political vacuums do not stay empty, they are filled instantly, and always by someone else. PTI’s absence from the Kashmir contest creates precisely such a vacuum, one that rival parties and entrenched interests will occupy without resistance.
There is a principle older than any single election cycle: never gift your opponent the field. Contest, even under imperfect conditions, even against odds, for participation itself is a statement of strength. Grievances over fairness, however legitimate, are best fought inside the arena, not from outside its gates. A party that boycotts loses twice, once at the ballot box it never faced, and once in the public memory that will not forgive absence.
PTI must reconsider. Political survival demands presence, not withdrawal. The people of Azad Kashmir deserve choices on their ballot, and PTI owes it to its own future not to vacate the field for others to inherit.
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