Daily Times

Electables remain the overwhelming power brokers in Pakistani democracy even after two successful five-year democratic terms that, nonetheless, remained marred by civil-military imbalance of power.

Though it has adopted the policy for a long time now, on last Friday, the party formed on the slogan of change officially endorsed reliance on electables to win elections when Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan underscored the importance of this particular breed of politicians to his disgruntled workers camped in front of his Bani Gala residence.

Part of the delay in the finalisation of candidates by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the PTI has to do with this reliance on electables. And the rest concerns infighting among different camps. Though there is no public record to back up these claims, there have been reports about differences within the Sharif family with the entry of the younger lot into politics. The rivalry between the two political heavyweights of the PTI from southern Punjab is now firmly in the public domain.

With just a month remaining in the election, none of the mainstream parties has released their manifestos. The only way for the voters to find out about parties’ vision is to refer to their leaders statements, now and in the past. But these statements aren’t exhaustive and they do little to inform voters about the specifics of economic, social and political policies the parties stand for. This becomes especially troubling in the big-ticket issues facing the polity at the moment.

While we know that the leadership of all three big parties has condemned enforced disappearances and media censorship, we don’t know if the parties have any concrete measures in mind to end this practice and to bring perpetrators to justice. Similarly, all parties decry dependence on IMF bailout packages but none has offered any action plan to effect structural reforms that can steer the economy out of the low-employment, low-revenue-generation trap. When stopgap measures are taken in the absence of such plans, they usually fall foul of realpolitik. The tax on banking and real estate transactions is a case in point. Then, there is the matter of formerly Federally Administered Tribal Areas’ full integration into Khyber Pukhtunkhwa (KP). Without specific timelines to put in place the required reforms explained in their manifestos, there is no way for voters to tell if and when parties will extend all constitutional structures to the region.

Pakistani democracy has come a long way from the 1990s but it still has to make strides to ensure that procedural matters like elections lead to substantial empowerment of the citizens, particularly those on the social and economic margins. Political parties will be the key variable in this process. To move forward, the parties must work on their institutionalisation, find the broad contours of their political ideology so that they can then formulate a political programme and attract a cadre linking them organically to the society, without the need for electables.  *

Published in Daily Times, June 25^th 2018.