Chasing the elections

A leading characteristic of the route to exercise in mass polling next month is the focus on procedural details that has eaten up a large chunk of election time. The polls are over-designed by Pakistani standards.

This is the result of decades of cynicism rooted in electoral malpractices that led to adversarial politics of the worst kind. While in India an incumbent government held elections and lost – led by Indira Gandhi in 1977 or Vajpayee in 2004 – in Pakistan persistent rigging at the hands of both civil and military governments led to the practice of putting a caretaker government in place. This was a step in the wrong direction, as a living monument to political corruption in a hopelessly divided society.

The 20th Amendment sought to institutionalise caretaker setups in the provincial capitals. Even as the treasury and opposition benches of the former National Assembly deliberated over appointment of the caretaker prime minister and chief ministers, the appointment of members of caretaker cabinets at all levels remains extremely arbitrary, thus nullifying the purpose of institutionalisation of the process to some extent.

Indeed, the whole agenda of conducting free and fair elections has been geared to the provision of meticulous procedures covering various steps from the announcement of candidature to post-election appellant tribunals. This reckless proceduralisation of elections has missed out on the hard-core political input as reflected through a shrinking space for projection, propagation and maturation of the political discourse based on issues and policies.

A leading factor in this shrinkage is terrorism. At one level, the Taliban and proto-Taliban militancy has reduced the election campaign to a war of nerves for survival – both physical and political. The swing voter, who provides a natural target for canvassing by contestants ranging from the right to the left of the political spectrum, cannot be fully exposed now to the message of the election campaign.

At the other level, the Taliban have declared a selective operation against ‘liberal’ parties – the ANP, the MQM and the PPP. By default, such ‘rightist’ parties as the JUI-F, the PTI and the PML-N have been exonerated from militant action. This has put in place a non-level political field for the ensuing electoral contest, especially in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab but also in urban Sindh. Previously, governments tipped the balance in favour of their cronies from within the political system. Now terrorists are seeking to shape the election results from outside the system itself.

Pakistan has experienced an extra-systemic input in electoral politics for decades now. First, the cultivation and mobilisation of divine sources of legitimacy at the huge cost of constitutional sources of legitimacy undermined the efficacy of mass mandate. Second, the streak of Bonapartism in the top brass created the cult of ‘statism’ by upholding the supreme national interest as an alibi for strict adherence to constitutionalism. In recent years, generals – Aslam Beg, Durrani, and Musharraf, among others – justified their questionable actions in supra-constitutional ‘patriotic’ terms in and outside the court.

The countdown to the May elections makes it clear that a certain pattern of religious de-alignment has set in. Islamic parties, including the JI and various sectarian parties, ranging from the JUI-F to the Sunni Tehreek and the Majlis-e-Wahdat-e-Muslimeen, have failed to mount a real challenge to the larger parties, even as there is an increasingly Islamically-oriented public. An informal but unacknowledged separation between religion and politics continues to operate, despite the political discourse moving in a different direction.

Party politics prior to elections traditionally relied on the leadership factor. In the absence of a clear set of policies, leaders provide the sources of identity for their respective parties. In Imran Khan’s party, the PTI, the leader is akin to the party itself, both positively as an exalted symbol of change and messiah for the youth and negatively as a one-man demolition squad.

At the other end, there are parties with non-leaders on top. Syed Munawar Hasan leads the JI, a cadre party par excellence. He is a non-descript worker-leader of a party that has been making the rounds for forming alliances with the PTI and the PML-N in a desperate attempt to stay afloat. Similarly, the Chaudhry brothers of the PML-Q never graduated to a leadership role beyond a party faction.

Between the two models of all-leadership-no-party such as the PTI and all-party-no-leadership such as the JI, we find two other models of ‘constrained’ and ‘contained’ leaderships. The former includes President Zardari who is constrained to stay away from the election campaign of his party, both legally and morally. It is very unlikely that he relinquishes his presidency in favour of the Senate chairman and jumps headlong into the election fray. He is any way a political manager not an election campaigner.

Altaf Hussain’s leadership-by-remote-control has increasingly become reactive to the political developments on the ground, ie the killings of party leaders and workers, the ECP’s initiatives about voter lists and electoral constituencies and the passing and scrapping of the legislation about local bodies. Constrained by both time and distance, the MQM’s leader has been soft-pedalling in the role of a healer or an ideologue in recent times.

The JUI’s Maulana Fazlur Rehman has not escaped unscathed from a smear campaign in political circles about his alleged somersaults. While the JUI is thin on the party side, which is a mere patchwork of religious-turned-political followers, it is thick on the leadership side atop a shrinking pedestal. The Maulana has lost his goodwill but not his will to fight.

Far away from an entertaining duel with the PTI leader on the cricket ground that never took place and a more real game of hide-and-seek with President Zardari during the last five years, the PML-N leader has been quietly operating from behind the scene. He has been making skilful moves on the chessboard of politics at the level of factional groupings by seeking to incorporate them in the party’s fold.

Nawaz Sharif is pursuing strategies to seek partners in rural Sindh and Balochistan and weld together powerful elements in Punjab in a contained but persistent way. The idea is to first win over and then win. He wants to provide space for local winners in pursuit of a representational strategy, whereby constituency plays the pivotal role in fetching votes.

Nawaz Sharif is competing with Imran Khan for the proto-Taliban votes in Punjab. Both want negotiations with the Taliban and other militant groups. Both have been outbidding each other for reflecting social acquiescence to violence in the name of religion while at the same time ‘appealing’ to the Taliban to adopt a soft strategy. Both have created alibis for militancy in the form of the American agenda of war against terror, drone attacks and Musharraf.

Imran is on a whirlwind tour of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab, leaving his arch-rival behind in terms of media coverage of the election campaign. His visibility, action and vision of a promised land can cost the Sharifs some extra seats. The PPP has suddenly become a leaderless party, relying heavily on the two martyrs to run its campaign. The ANP and the MQM are rightly disgusted over the militancy that is targeting them. Where is the state, represented by the caretaker government and the security apparatus in the present scenario?

The writer is professor of Political Science at the Department of Social Sciences, LUMS. Email: waseem@lums.edu.pk