A year of election

The year 2023 is coming to an end as yet another rough year for Pakistan’s democracy; 2024 appears to be no better either. We finally have a ‘set in stone’ date for Pakistan’s 12th general election though a broad societal understanding also exists on how unfair the election is likely to be. Analysts believe that the ‘unfairness’ level of the 2024 general election will be similar to what was witnessed in the 2018 general election. What remains to be seen is whether the upcoming election will be a repeat of the 2002 general election instead.

In report issued by the PTI on December 26, titled ‘Widespread Pre-Poll Rigging Rattles Pakistan: Reports of Arrests, Abductions and Harassment’, the party catalogued issues encountered by the party’s head and leaders in submitting nomination papers, complaining of “yet another reprehensible display of unabashed fascism and a shameless assault on democracy,” a “disturbing and calculated campaign of pre-poll rigging aimed squarely” at PTI candidates.

The PTI, however, is not the only party complaining of pre-poll rigging. There have been similar accusations from other parties, including the PML-N which is busy carving a new narrative that not enough ‘justice’ has been meted out to the PTI for the role it has been accused of playing on May 9. The party is grumbling that the country was fed a steady diet of the atrocities committed in the May 9 mayhem but there is a failure of firm follow-through on it. It is seeking an elevated or at least a similar degree of favouritism that was used for the PTI’s victory in the 2018 election. The PPP is angry against the tilting of the electoral field in favour of the PML-N just as it is proudly welcoming dissidents from the PTI with visible ties to the country’s power brokers. Despite disagreements on the content of leading parties’ objections, they echo the same in the absence of a level-playing field.

As the electoral watchdog, armed fully with independence through the constitution and comprehensive legal provisions, the ECP has a mandatory role in ensuring a free and fair election. But its role, through sudden bouts of activism to cases and periods of being a passive spectator are raising eyebrows.

Dejected perhaps by a majority of general elections since 1985 as managed affairs, the people of Pakistan do not place much trust in the ECP. A July 2023 public opinion poll by Gallup Pakistan placed the ECP’s institutional ratings at 42 per cent, well below the Pakistan Army’s at 88 per cent and both media and courts at 56 per cent.

Despite a steady campaign of vilification of the ECP by the PTI government beginning after the Senate election of March 2021, hopes were ignited in the ECP’s increasing independence in the aftermath of its inquiry report on the Daska by-election. To its credit, the ECP largely withstood the pressure from a leading political party as well the higher judiciary. In a letter to parliament’s Presiding Officers in April 2023, the CEC formally complained of ‘judicial overbearing’ diluting the ECP’s constitutional writ and effectively binding its hands in the face of brazen attacks. He also questioned whether the ECP could perform its bedrock duty to conduct free, fair, and transparent elections to the best of its ability in the given environment.

The ECP’s role in holding same-day or staggering elections after the premature dissolution of the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assemblies was criticized by many, though it found favour from the ruling coalition government. The ECP has also faltered in the cases of partisanship of caretaker governments.

Article 224 (1-B) of the constitution states that members of the caretaker cabinets including the caretaker prime minister and the caretaker chief ministers and their immediate family members [spouses and children] shall not be eligible to contest the immediately following elections to such assemblies.

When newer inductions were made to the federal caretaker cabinet in September 2023, the ECP wrote to the caretaker PM’s principal secretary advising the caretaker government to avoid inducting individuals with known political allegiances. However, the ECP did not object to the induction of a sitting senator of the Balochistan Awami Party (BAP), Mr Sarfaraz Bugti as caretaker minister of interior. The ECP has since feigned ignorance even after Mr Bugti resigned from the post of interior minister as late as the middle of December and has joined the PPP with the intention to contest elections.

A similar flip-flop was earlier witnessed in the case of the KP caretaker government which took oath on January 26, 2023 with well-documented political affiliation of most caretaker ministers. But the ECP chose to take action only in July 2023 leading to the sacking of almost the entire KP caretaker cabinet involved in politics.

An unprecedented scrutiny by the ECP of intraparty elections of parties is also questioned. The key recipient of the scrutiny is the PTI, or whatever is left of it after being the latest victim of political engineering in Pakistan. Though the PTI found relief against the ECP’s order on disallowing the party from retaining its ‘bat’ electoral symbol, the ECP claims it has also suspended election symbols of at least 10 other political parties including the ANP on similar grounds.

While the media is busy cataloguing the role of the ECP, it is important to remember that despite the passage of five years, the ECP has not carried out and publicly shared an independent inquiry into the sudden dysfunction of the state-of-the-art Result Transmission System (RTS).

The RTS infamously came to a standstill in the evening of the election day of July 25, 2018. Well after midnight on the 2018 election day, the ECP secretary appeared on TV screens to inform the nation that the RTS had “collapsed” and that the ECP was returning to the traditional method of manually tabulating the results. For a time after the 2018 general election, some political furore made the ECP to initially ask the cabinet division to form an inquiry committee for failure of RTS. However, its report, if an inquiry was ever conducted, never saw the light of day.

Despite bleak prospects of fairness, Pakistan’s experience shows that even a flawed election opens up political space and eases political control somewhat against the condemned political actors. But being stuck as an ‘electoral autocracy’ is not a solution. Until political parties choose to cure themselves of the addiction of unelected and apolitical patronage, and the establishment fully extricates itself from politics, we will only go through the motions of expensive and bitterly-contested electoral cycles without any meaningful reform in achieving effective democratic governance.

The writer is an analyst working in the field of politics, democratic governance, legislative development and rule of law.