Photo: Messenger
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, after lots of speculation, rumour, hesitation and hiccup, is going for a national election scheduled on February 8.
No doubt, the military establishment, headquartered in Rawalpindi, is the master of the ceremony. The military hawks ensured that the third main contender remained absent from TV screens.
The charismatic cricketer-turned politician Imran Khan is now languishing in the prison cell. His Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and its popular election symbol ‘Bat’ has already been minused.
The Khan is in think soup and will not be out of prison for a while. His party has been tattered and leaders are facing imprisonment and corruption charges.
The PTI has witnessed the defection and boycott of several top leaders, as well as local leaders in several provinces.
Well, the party has been banned, and the election symbol ‘Bat’ has been withdrawn from the list of symbols for electioneering by the Election Commission of Pakistan.
The PTI government was replaced by the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), a coalition government comprising the conservative PML-N and the center-left PPP, along with other smaller parties.
Khan accused the military of orchestrating his ouster amid an ongoing power struggle regarding the appointment of the chief of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.
The elections will take place at a turbulent time in Pakistan’s history as it reels from multiple crises, including an economic downturn, tensions along its disputed borders, and rising militancy that has strained relations with neighbouring Iran and Afghanistan.
Pakistan faces twin insurgencies: one in northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa by Islamist groups and one in the southwest by ethno-nationalist Baloch groups.
A national assembly candidate was shot dead on Wednesday in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. On the same day, another political leader was shot dead in his party's election office in Balochistan.
There is a lack of enthusiasm among the smaller parties too in the elections 2024 and they are out of the tamasha.
Despite the limitations, lots of development has occurred during the run-up to the parliamentary election. There was some welcome improvement in a few weeks, even if it has seemed at times that it is just two parties swapping the limelight between them.
The main contenders are between Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N). The others are mostly regional, ethnic, and Islamist parties, which have done pretty well during previous elections.
The lesser parties have never received comfortable votes to have enough votes to be elected to parliament.
However, the lesser parties, like the Islamist, regional, and ethnic parties, have shown their strength in the provincial assembly. Their halla-hulla does not reach the ears of Islamabad.
Pakistan is possibly the only country in South Asia where an elected government has completed a full five-year term in the national parliament. The governments have been ousted by the military establishment within a few years of the political administration.
Since 1956, the United Government was ousted in less than two years in a coup by General Ayub Khan in 1958. Throughout Pakistan’s checkered democratic history, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, his daughter Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, and last year Imran Khan were shown the exit. In the upcoming election, a lack of enthusiasm has left the polls looking like a three-way fight—albeit one in which one of the main contenders has been handicapped.
The dynastic duo, the PPP and the PML-N, which have been in power in Pakistan since the 1990s, bears significant responsibility for limiting the benefits of the economic liberalisation drive to the wealthy while paralysing regulatory mechanisms meant to protect the downtrodden from the excesses of business interests. This stands in contrast to the practice of privatising essential services such as health and education but shifting the burden of economic downturn onto the masses, Riaz Missen writes in The Friday Times (TFT).
The dynasty has also acted as a stumbling block to the devolution of power to grassroots levels, denying constitutionally mandated local governments the administrative, political, and fiscal powers required for a fair distribution of resources across the country and, hence, laying the foundation for sustainable growth. Instead, they confined the devolution process to the provinces, leaving power and resources at the discretion of chief ministers, while the third tier of government was paralysed, remarked TFT.
The influential women’s organisation Aurat Foundation has complained to the Election Commission of Pakistan to take legal action against political parties which have violated this clause. Every political party must field at least 5 per cent of women candidates on general seats in the National Assembly and four provincial assemblies.
The parties which have been identified include Pakistan Peoples Party Parliamentarians (PPPP), Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), Awami National Party (ANP), Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), Balochistan National Party (BNP), Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), and Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf’s (PTI) name is not mentioned, as the party has been deprived of the symbol.
In a Sunni Muslim-conservative country, the women are a silent population. Well, the second-class citizen has a comfortable status, but women are treated miserably. Most importantly, women in Pakistan have no say in society, and empowerment is a taboo.
Women in far-flung regions are refused to send girl-child for education and they are treated as subservient to male, which has spiked appalling human rights abuse against women folks.
The election race is heating up in the country's most populous province of Punjab. At the same time, the outcome in the smallest province by population, Balochistan, is sure to be closely watched by China, as the restive region forms the heart of its Belt and Road investments in the South Asian nation, writes Pearl Pandya, the South Asia Assistant Research Manager at ACLED.
The resulting instability has served to strengthen the hand of the military, the dominant force in Pakistani politics. Claims of military interference in the democratic process are rife ahead of the 2024 elections, with political disorder and militant attacks characterising the run-up to the vote.
Within the prevailing political and security situation, effective participation by political parties and citizens in the electoral process remains questionable. Campaigning activities have been restrained in the run-up to the elections, while the crackdown against the PTI has continued unabated.
Meanwhile, Khan has shown no signs of backing down—on the one hand, expressing confidence about the PTI springing a “surprise” on polling day and, on the other, claiming that any elections held in the current climate would be “a disaster and a farce.”
Pakistan is China’s all-weather friend and has listened to the tune of Beijing for decades, since the 1970s.
For this geopolitical reason, China opposed the liberation war of Bangladesh. China opposed the United Nations’ membership of Bangladesh and refused to give diplomatic recognition until Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in mid-August 1975.
However, the United States believes that Pakistan is a strategic partner courtesy of the Global War on Terror, when allied forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001. The State Department of the US this time remarked, "It's not for the United States to dictate to Pakistan the exact specifics of how it conducts its election."
The writer is an award-winning journalist and Deputy Editor of The Daily Messenger
Messenger/Disha
