Durable democracy

Democracy is the complex web of connections between individual politicians, political parties, the electorate, civil society, media and state institutions that is formed through the electoral process.
The roots of Indian democracy have been strengthened due to the establishment and consolidation of the Indian Election Commission through parliament and the constitution of India. The trust invested by the politicians, the public, civil society and the media invested in this commission have further empowered it. Despite this, the election commission requires still greater independence. This has become a highly significant aspect of the discourse on electoral reforms in India.
Thanks in large part to the media’s effectiveness, there is growing awareness and expanded consciousness in Indian society of the prevalent flaws in their democracy. Within this context, there has been a pressing emphasis since the 1980s on electoral reforms that would make Indian democracy more efficient, transparent and relatively free from the pressures of communalism, caste-ism, ethno-centrism and gender, along with class-based concerns.
What is especially needed are electoral reforms that deal with the independence of the election commission, prevent the criminalisation of politics and the politics of criminalisation, and promote the cleansing of the political parties themselves. Among the miscellaneous issues requiring electoral reform are gender issues as well as technical issues that can enhance further transparency in Indian democracy.
Unlike India, Pakistan’s political history demonstrates the vulnerability of its democracy. Since the country’s inception, its politics have oscillated between military rule and electoral democracy. The latter held sway from 1947-1958, 1972-1977, 1988-1999 and, finally, since 2008, and military rule persisted during the intermittent periods.
This alone suggests that Pakistan’s democracy has continuously been in a state of transition. Even the democratic phase from 1988-1999 remained politically unstable due to mid-term dismissals of both former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, representing the PPP, and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, representing the PML. Thus it has not only been military coups that strained the democratic process in Pakistan, but even elected governments have been unable to stabilise the country’s democratic process.
Traditionally, the uncurtailed power of the military establishment, along with the deterioration in civil-military relations, have been held responsible for the fragile democratic process in Pakistan. At a deeper level, however, it is also the failure of the democratic leadership to strengthen the democratic process itself. Fortunately, democracy has continued in Pakistan since the end of Musharraf’s rule in 2008, and the first ever peaceful transition in government occurred in 2013 when the government of former president Asif Ali Zardari completed its five-year term.
Why and what does Pakistan need to learn from Indian democracy? As a nascent and fragile democracy, Pakistan needs to study the institutionalisation of democracy in India. In particular, our country needs to further enhance the power of its own election commission through independent funding as well as its empowerment through the media, public, civil society, and the political parties.
In this regard electoral reforms would serve to increase the trust of the electorate and politicians alike in the election commission, which would make our democracy more transparent. Moreover, following the Indian example, Pakistan needs to prevent the criminalisation of politics through its own electoral reforms. Such reforms would ideally break the nexus between politics and crime created by black money, muscle men, violence, mafias etc.
The Election Commission of India has been empowered by the country’s political parties, media, the civil society, as well as by the general public who so far have accepted the results of all general and state-level elections. Yet, India has been trying to make its election commission even more independent through electoral reforms. Pakistan should also move in a similar direction.
Finally, Pakistan must also increase transparency in the political parties themselves through electoral reforms. These reforms should ideally deal with questions such as internal elections within political parties, along with the audit of political parties’ accounts, among other issues; aim at ending the strong linkage between politics and criminalisation; and include the implementation of a range of other miscellaneous reforms.
But recommendations for electoral reforms are one matter, their implementation quite another. Unless the government has strong enough will to carry through reforms via effective legislation and its enforcement, democracy in Pakistan will remain a myth.
In a nutshell, democracy as a model of governance has been so very complex that every age and territory has had to discover its own merits and its own flaws in the political structure, and invent new ways to deal with these in its own way – and so extend the journey of electoral reforms from one century to the next.
The writer is a research scholar at theInstitute of Regional Studies, Iamabad, and a faculty member at Quaid-e-AzamUniversity, Islamabad.
Email: yasirmasoodkhan@googlemail.com