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emocracy rests on the institutions of political parties, the parliament, the judiciary, the media and the conduct of free and fair elections at regular intervals. Elections alone do not constitute democracy but a democracy without elections is not participatory and is therefore, unsustainable.
This article examines the weaknesses of Pakistan’s electoral system.
The central pillar of elections and democracy are the people. The first sentence in the preamble of the constitution says, “... authority to be exercised by the people of Pakistan.” The phrase “We the people” similarly originates from the preamble of the constitution of the United States. It is based on the belief that people alone are the sovereign.
The word jamhoor in Urdu means the people in the political sense. When the constitution was written in 1956, it was decided to celebrate the Youm-i-Jamhooriah on March 23 every year. Ayub Khan later changed the annual military parade date from August 14 to March 23, renaming it as Pakistan Day. The next year, the military parade at Wagha was institutionalised. This was a declaration that the locus of power lay in brass and not in jamhoor, the people.
To restore the credibility of the electoral process, supremacy of the jamhoor must be respected.
The prevalence of a certain mindset has contributed to depriving the election process of its credibility. Some of the critical issues in this regard are:
Manipulation of electoral processes and people’s mandate with impunity. How else can one describe the failure of RTS (result transmission system) in 2018 and the breakdown of the internet in 2024 elections? Can anyone honestly claim that politics and elections, particularly in the restive province of Balochistan, are driven by its people? Overcoming the state of denial is the first step towards necessary reform.
The under-representation of women, minorities and marginalised segments has distorted the electoral process. In 2018, the women turnout was 46.7 percent, nine percent lower than that of men, which stood at 55.7 percent. Issues in registering women as voters and access to polling stations prevented nearly 11 million women from exercising their right to vote. For the sake of comparison, in the 2018 election, the winning party polled nearly 17 million votes throughout the country. If the 11 million women had not been disenfranchised, the results might have been different.
The CNIC is a mere identification document. Making it a mandatory requirement, turns citizens’ right to vote conditional on first fulfilling their responsibility to get their CNICs. The responsibility of the ECP has thus been shifted to the citizen/ voter. This requirement lies at the root of disenfranchising millions of women.
The discussion on mainstreaming persons with disabilities (PWDs) in elections has not moved beyond building of ramps and the angles at which ramps should be made. They are unable to participate in all stages of the election process. The latest census shows their population to be 7.4 million. However, some NGOs claim there are 35 million PWDs. Only 610,000 have disability certificates because the procedure to get those is difficult.
In the 2024 census, the transgender population was a little over 20,000. In the 2017 census, they had counted a little over ten thousand, of which 29 percent did not have CNICs. Are these figures realistic? The transgender people have long demanded a separate column in the voters’ list.
The constitution guarantees a joint electorate, including Muslims and non-Muslims in one voter list. However, Ahmadis have been excluded from it.
The representatives of minorities in the present system do not represent their communities. Instead, they represent their party’s leaders. This, too, has corrupted the electoral process.
Pakistan has become a majoritarian state. The economic and political power is distributed on the basis of the population of federating units. Districts like Lahore, Faisalabad and Karachi have more seats in the National Assembly than the entire province of Balochistan because of majoritarianism. This is a disincentive for political parties to invest financial and political capital in that province. Even free and fair elections will not address critical issues inherent in a majoritarian polity.
We have also become a security driven state. In such a state, the welfare of the people and elections take a back seat. This gives rise to a de facto or ‘deep’ state with little respect for the constitution, people’s mandate and trichotomy of powers. In such a dispensation, elections have little relevance, even if the exercise is free and fair.
Populism and fake news undermine democracy and elections. This is a global phenomenon as indicated in elections recently held in the US and several European countries. Pakistan, too, is witnessing populism. Populist leaders have turned fascists in the past, as happened in Germany (Hitler) and Italy (Mussolini). This can upend all institutions of democracy and electoral processes.
That social media and fake news adversely impacted the integrity of the Brexit referendum in UK and US elections in 2016 is now well documented. In Pakistan, state institutions have been accused of resorting to fake news. In 2109, Facebook blocked hundreds of pages which it found were linked to a security related body.
Political finance is another corrupting influence. When you don’t control money in politics, money controls politics. Stopping money from controlling politics is important for democracy. That is why 180 out of 193 countries have political finance laws. Money in elections, particularly in Senate elections, has played havoc. We have still to adopt a robust political finance system based on the principles of disclosure, enforcement and sanctions.
These issues relate not only to the Election Commission and the parliament but also to political parties. Massive reforms aimed at structured decision making and giving voice to women and marginalised sections in their decision-making bodies, like the CEC are needed. Barring one or two parties, this is sorely missing in the party level discourse.
Finally, when major political parties look to unelected and unaccountable elements to bring them into power, they are undermined and compromised and the people disenfranchised. Political parties then cannot complain that they are powerless before the ‘deep’ state. It is the political parties that have to correct these ills of democracy. No one else will do it for them.
The writer, a human rights activist, is a former senator.