The Senate verdict

A vigilant media was the major reason behind a push to stop large-scale buying and selling of votes in the elections to the Senate. Though money did change hands, and to some extent impacted the result, it wasn’t at the scale that was feared.
It is true the media exaggerated the issue but the unusually strong criticism of the anticipated horse-trading brought the matter into the limelight and prompted the political parties to consider taking remedial measures.
In the end, legislators mostly voted for candidates fielded by the parties and the outcome of the Senate elections largely went according to the parties’ strength in the National Assembly and the provincial assemblies. An overwhelming majority of lawmakers refused to be tempted by the lure of handsome amounts of money being offered by moneyed candidates vying for seats in the Upper House. This was a welcome development at a time when Pakistani politicians are generally getting a bad press and have earned, rightly or wrongly, a tainted image.
It would be wrong to claim that all the assembly members voted according to party discipline. There were exceptions as some legislators found the offers of money too tempting to turn down. It is even possible that some ultra-rich candidates put up by political parties had to pay reasonable sums of money to lawmakers of their own parties to prevent them from voting for someone else. It is now the duty of the leadership of the political parties to identify the culprits and make them accountable. If the past is any guide, most parties didn’t take proper action against those who sold their votes. This emboldened those who violated party discipline and those with little consideration for morality. In the process, the Senate elections came to be viewed with suspicion with the legislators seen as a saleable commodity.
Internal differences, choice of candidates and complaints against party leadership were also why some members of the provincial assemblies defied their leaders. Awarding party tickets to candidates from other provinces was also disliked by some MPAs. The PPP’s Rahman Malik and the MQM’s Mian Atiq belonged to Punjab and won from Sindh and the PML-N’s Nihal Hashmi and Salim Zia hailed from Sindh but were fielded in Punjab. The MQM’s Barrister Saif is a native of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa but was put up as a candidate in Sindh. All these candidates had no chance of winning from their native provinces. The parties that fielded them needed them in the Senate or wanted to gain influence in the provinces to which they belonged.
This is obviously against the principle of giving true representation to the provinces and needs to be curbed. The practice isn’t new as the Jamaat-e-Islami – after the 2002 general elections – had fielded Prof Khurshid Ahmad for a Senate seat from KP on the MMA ticket even though he didn’t belong to the province.
No horse-trading was possible in the election for Senate from the federal capital, Islamabad, as the outcome was obvious due to the comfortable majority enjoyed by the PML-N. The two PML-N candidates, Iqbal Zafar Jhagra and Raheela Magsi, easily prevailed in the contest. Jhagra is from KP and Magsi from Sindh and there has been some subdued criticism as to why someone from Islamabad wasn’t fielded for the seats from the federal capital. The case of the retiring Senate chairman Nayyar Hussain Bokhari, who is from rural Islamabad and belonged to the PPP, is cited in this context. However, there is nothing wrong in fielding candidates from other provinces to represent the federal territory of Islamabad in the Senate as it is the symbol of the federation of Pakistan. In any case, most of the wealthy politicians maintain houses in Islamabad and have virtually become Islamabadians.
In Punjab too the verdict was a foregone conclusion due to the absolute majority of the PML-N in the provincial assembly. The PPP’s Nadeem Afzal Chan fought a losing battle to win a seat even though he got 11 additional votes than those possessed by his party. These may be have been polled by disgruntled PML-N MPAs, including some of the two dozen independents who had joined the party after the May 2013 general election. Still the PML-N swept the Senate polls and won all the seats for which election was held. Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif must have worked hard to keep amused by whatever means possible the army of 312 PML-N MPAs in Punjab.
The situation in Sindh was also clear and as expected the ruling PPP and the urban-based MQM won all the available Senate seats. PML-Functional tried to snatch one seat with support from the PML-N, but it later emerged that the latter didn’t vote for its candidate, the delightfully named Imamuddin Shouqeen. He had little chance once the PPP and MQM made a deal to share the spoils of victory. The two parties, which have had a love-hate relationship, were so comfortably placed in the numbers game that they gave tickets to outsiders to contest from Sindh. Even then, they resorted to some kind of horse-trading and got more votes than their strength in the Sindh Assembly. Also, blank papers were found in ballot boxes in Sindh, just as in KP, explaining the extent to which some parties went to ask their suspect MPAs to bring their original ballot paper out and show it to the party’s whips.
In Balochistan, independent candidate Mir Yousaf Badini, who in the past was a PPP senator, caused an upset when he won a Senate seat at the expense of the PML-N’s Sardar Yaqoob Nasir who lost despite his party’s significant strength in the provincial assembly. His defeat must have something to do with rifts in the PML-N, and Badini’s prowess as a wealthy vote-getter.
The PML-N’s Kulsoom Perveen, who changed her party before the polls after having served as senator from the PML-Q and BNP-Awami platform, won a reserved seat for women despite opposition from Balochistan Assembly Speaker Jan Mohammad Jamali, who defied the PML-N leadership by fielding his daughter Sana Jamali as an independent candidate. Jamali’s anger with the PML-N for not giving the party ticket to his daughter indirectly helped Sardar Akhtar Mengal’s BNP-Mengal as he voted for its candidate Dr Jehanzeb Jamaldini and facilitated his victory. It was evident once again that party affiliation counts for little in Balochistan as tribal affiliation, social ties and, of course, money, play a more dominant role in determining the course of politics and elections.
The situation in KP was most interesting. To their credit, the PTI’s mostly young and first-timer MPAs voted largely according to party discipline. There were a number of reasons for that, ranging from party chairman Imran Khan’s warning that he would ensure dissolution of the provincial assembly and send the disloyal MPAs to jail to the pragmatic approach of Chief Minister Pervez Khattak who forged a deal with the PML-N to support each other’s candidates. He killed two birds with one stone – bagged seven seats for PTI and its allies,the Jamaat-e-Islami and AJIP, and also denied a seat to Maulana Fazlur Rahman’s JUI-F and defeated moneyed candidates such as Ammar Ahmad Khan and his elder brother Waqar Ahmad Khan who had never lost a Senate election in the past. Though some legislators from almost all the parties indulged in horse-trading, the biggest winners in the province were the PTI and its allies along with the PML-N, PPP and ANP while the biggest losers were Aftab Sherpao’s QWP and the JUI-F.
Fata, lagging behind in every respect, lagged once again as the eleventh hour presidential ordinance changing the voting mechanism led to postponement of polls for the four Senate seats from Fata. The ordinance was issued not only to stop horse-trading but also to make the situation more favourable for the PML-N, which needed to win a seat or two from Fata to overtake the PPP and bag the Senate chairman’s office.
The ordinance was ill-timed and sort of horse-trading, but this is the way Senate elections have figured out. The matter is now in court. The better solution would be to hold Senate polls in Fata the way they are held in the rest of Pakistan as the 12 Fata MNAs empowered to elect four Senators create conditions in which cartels are formed and unimaginable bids made to secure their votes.
The writer is resident editor of The News in Peshawar.
Email: rahimyusufzai@yahoo.com