Daily Times

This past week the Turks voted in their parliamentary elections. While at present there is some uncertainty around the formation of the new government, there are overwhelming positives that have come out of these elections, positives that other countries in the Muslim world, especially Pakistan, should take note of.

First and foremost, the obvious question: is Turkey going to be Islamist or Kemalist? The people of Turkey have shown that they want a balance between the two extremes. All indications are that Turkey’s main Islamic rooted party, the Adalet ve Kalkýnma Partisi (AKP), will have to form a coalition government with the Kemalist Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP). The AKP has been at the forefront of the democratisation of Turkey and the curtailment of the role of the military in the country. It has also, over its 13 years in power, shown itself to be a capable economic manager. However, Reccip Tayyip Erdogan, the charismatic leader of the AKP, was increasingly showing the authoritarian tendency of consolidating all power in his person in an attempt to become the ‘Islamic Ataturk’ to undo Kemal Ataturk’s secularising reforms. By depriving the AKP of an outright majority, the people rejected overwhelmingly Erdogan’s social re-engineering agenda. They also stopped his attempt to change parliamentary democracy to a presidential one in its tracks. Yet the AKP is the single largest party by a mile because it is a party with deep roots in the masses, especially the rural and urban middle classes, which are by temperament conservative.

However, the best outcome of these elections was that they were a thumping triumph of diversity and multiculturalism over monoculture. Feleknas Uca of the pro-Kurdish Halklarýn Demokratik Partisi (HDP), a newly elected Yazidi legislator, summed it up best when speaking to AFP. She said, “In Turkey there is one system based on one nation, one language, one land and one religion. We say more religions, more languages, more nations.” This is precisely what the rise of the HDP means. The HDP, which has its roots in Kurdish nationalism, decided under the leadership of human rights lawyer Sellahattin Demirtas to expand its voter base by appealing not just to Kurds but the Turkish left and other liberal Turkish groups. The electorate rewarded the HDP accordingly with 80 seats in the Turkish Grand National Assembly. Turkey, which has as troubled a history with its ethnic and religious diversity as us if not more, today has three Turkish-Armenians in its legislature, one each from the AKP, CHP and HDP. This is an extraordinary achievement considering the total number of Turkish-Armenians is less than 100,000 out of a population of 75 million. Amongst the HDP’s other legislators elected is Erol Dora, a Syriac Christian. The total number of women legislators in the Grand National Assembly has gone up to 96. As many as 30 of the HDP’s 80-strong contingent are women. The Turkish parliament is going to have representation from Alavis, Christians, Roma, Armenians, Kurds and Yazidis. This is no small thing for a country that has been self-consciously Turkish in identity and consequently Hanafi Sunni Muslim in religion. It must be remembered that 99 percent of Turkey is Muslim and about 80 percent identifies as being Turk.

Pakistan is far more diverse than Turkey, linguistically, ethnically and religiously. Yet this diversity is seldom put to good use. Our diversity beckons the Pakistani equivalent of the HDP to step up to the plate and unify the minorities, ethnic groups, the left and the liberals on one platform. It needs to be a party that can give a socially progressive agenda and emphasise constitutionalism and diversity. It needs to become the voice of the voiceless: of religious minorities, women and other marginalised groups. It needs to be a secular party in deed, in name and in spirit. Such a party is needed to rescue Pakistan from the quagmire of 20th century nationalism and bring it, if need be, kicking and screaming into the 21st century. It needs to be a patriotic party in so much as it must be committed to the principle of a Pakistani federation and the rights of Pakistani citizens without distinction of religion, caste or creed. Pakistan’s democratic project, if allowed to sustain itself, will throw up a party like this sooner or later. And it will throw up the requisite leadership as well.

The Supreme Court (SC) of Pakistan had discussed not long ago the ways in which a party can go about democratically secularising Pakistan. The answer is by educating the people on what it means to be secular. It does not mean that you stop respecting religion but that you do not impose your religion on others. It means avoiding tragic compromises like the ones Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had an excellent opportunity to bring about such a change, made in his troubled five years in power. It means you place the right to worship freely or to not worship at all, the right to speak and the right to equal protection of the law above all other considerations. Pakistan’s founding father, Jinnah, laid down such a state as the ideal for Pakistan not just on August 11 but repeatedly throughout his long political career. However, even he understood it was only going to be possible in “due course of time”. With enough cycles of democracy, I have no doubt that we will be able to achieve that aspiration one day.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com