PAKISTAN: Early election calls

Editorial Frontier Post

Crying calls from various political quarters have lately begun gaining in stridency. Sections of commentariat and intelligentsia too have joined the cacophony. The callers argue that the incumbent PPP-led government has failed to deliver for its ineptitude, incompetence and corruption and early elections have thus become imperative to seek the people’s fresh mandate to administer the state. Yes, not even the staunchest party loyalists will be able to defend this government, such an utter failure has it been in serving the masses and delivering their needs. And no street will shed even a tear if it departs.
But what is the alternative? What have its opponents in their plans to succeed where it has failed so abysmally? On that count, they all come across as totally blank and empty. None has enunciated what could safely be called a policy. It is all populist slogans and superficial rhetorical assertions you get from them on this score. Surely, vowing to bring back the stashed slush money of some grandees from abroad by no stretch can be construed as economic policy. In itself, it is a very dubious proposition, when one cannot even know for sure who is keeping what and where overseas and then if at all the laws of the land where that hoard is stashed would allow its repatriation.
Nor vowing to end corruption within 90 days could be called an economic policy. Not even could it be viewed as a rational and practicable anti-corruption strategy when what to talk of 90 days not even in as many months can this curse be wiped out, so deeply and extensively has it afflicted the polity. It is not only the high places where corruption has embedded. It has spread out its tentacles to every segment of the society. Even the private sector has got infected. And it would require a well-thought-out policy and a meticulously-planned strategy to purge the polity of the scourge, which if it happens in years we would be quite lucky.
Let it be clear. The bane of our politics is that it is personality not issue based. It is not the issues that distinguish parties from one another. It is the personality that is their distinctive mark. The parties are known by the dynasts that hold them under their thumbs, not for their ideological leanings or political philosophies. The British electorate knows what the Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democratic parties stand for, and knows that within the framework of those well-defined ideological and political configurations each will formulate its policies and programmes. But ours have no such delineations for the voter to guide.
There, the parties in their general meetings debate the issues and thrash out their party lines. Here, it really is so shocking hearing a party apparatchik saying the party had spent three hours in discussing the issue and left the final decision to party head honcho to make. That privilege neither the Conservatives nor the Labourites or the Liberal Democrats would give to their party chiefs. It is the party that there decides. It is the party chief here who decides. His word is the party policy, party line and party stance.
So let there be an early election, and we will simply be travelling down from one darkness into another. Since the voter doesn’t at all what is the economic, defence or foreign policy of any of the parties in the ring, he would just be betting blindly. In any case, the early election is going to be no big deal. The same pedigrees, dynasties and patriarchies, more or less, will return to legislatures and governments. The same landed aristocracies, feudalities and robber baronages will stage a comeback. It is the fat bellies that clash. And they will clash again with their steel of clout acquired by their hold on their captive electorates, right connections in right places and money power accumulated by means foul.
The political tribe has coined the terminology of “electable”, which is as deceptive as its coinage of “reconciliation”. If reconciliation is simply its cloak for the most unseemly deal-makings for staying on in power, electable is simply another deception for the election of the otherwise unfit. The term gives the deceitful impression of the electable being the right choice on the basis of merit, public-spiritedness and public service. But in reality it means the person has the inherited dynastic awesome clout or irresistible money power to get elected.
The cliché-savvy commentariat has added up to this deceit its own coinages of dharabandi and baradari for electable. But dissect these coinages to the bones and it comes to the same that it is the unchallengeable by dint of clout or money who romps home. A Jat would not necessarily vote for a Jat for being from the Jat baradari. But he would haplessly when a powerful Jat dynast would twist his arms. And it is not unknown when two Jat dynasts are in the fray, the poor Jat elder divides up evenly his family members, with one half voting for one Jat contestant and the other for the other.
So what difference would early election would make? There will be no change from the past. Even the rising star vowing a change is falling for the trite. He is taking under his wings the garbage of old stock, deserting from other parties. The early elections will at best satiate the hunger for power of those presently sulking in the wilderness of opposition.