The Supreme Court deprived the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf its electoral symbol, bat, on Saturday, essentially meaning that it has been ruled out of contesting the upcoming general elections as a party.

While the SC decision has major implications for how the party will attempt to organise its campaign across the country as each candidate could potentially have a different symbol, there is also one major result the party could miss out on: reserved seats.

The National Assembly has a total of 70 reserved seats, inlcuding 60 for women and 10 for minorities, that are awarded to a party based on a proportion of the seat it manges to win through the polls.

In the 2018 election, the PTI was given 33 reserved seats in the National Assembly, including 28 for women and five for minorities.

However, with the party already facing grim prospects of going to the polls, it could lose out on these additional seats as well.

The Election laws clearly state that reserved seats can only be awarded to a party if it has been awarded an election symbol by the Election Commission of Pakistan

Section 94 of the Election Rules 2017 lays out how reserved seats will be awarded to a party according to the proportion of seats then win through the election. It goes on to add an ‘explanation’ that reads:

“For the purpose of this rule, the expression “political party” means a political party to which a symbol has been allocated by the Commission.”

Read: PTI candidates to contest elections as independent candidates

The symbol was denied to the party by the ECP and the decision has now been upheld by the SC. Therefore, no matter how well it fares in the election, a key chunk of the lower house’s seats is simply out of the party’s reach.

In a post on X right after the SC announced its decision, lawyer and activist Jibran Nisar said that PTI had lost all apsects of a reserved seats.

“This most regrettably is equivalent to disenfranchising tens of millions of voters across Pakistan,” he wrote.