The Election Commission of Pakistan’s politically motivated verdict against Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), accusing Pakistan’s most popular political party of receiving funds from foreign nationals and entities, raises two vital questions: are Pakistani political parties permitted to mount fundraising campaigns to meet electoral campaign-related expenses, and are Pakistani expats, even if they have renounced Pakistani citizenship, allowed to contribute money to such funds?
Rather than an indictment on PTI’s illicit financial
transactions, the election commission’s verdict, in fact, was the vindication
of PTI’s stance that the party’s financial transactions and record-keeping are
completely transparent and accounted for.
Had Pakistani expats contributed their hard-earned money to
electoral funds of PML-N or PPP, it would certainly have ended up in the benami
bank accounts of Maqsood Chaprasi and Gullu Butt. But even the election
commission’s verdict implicitly acknowledges that the purported “prohibited
funds” were actually deposited in the party’s bank accounts and were used on
running electoral campaigns of PTI’s candidates.
In Pakistan’s political system, there are three major
structural faults. A representative and democratic political system weeds out
corrupt and inept rulers in the long run. But Pakistan’s democracy was derailed
by three decade-long martial laws and every time it got back to square one and
had to start anew.
Democracy works like the trial-and-error method: politicians
who fail to perform are cast aside and those who deliver are retained through
election process. A martial law, especially if it is decade-long, gives a new
lease of life to the already tried, tested and failed politicians.
The second major fault in Pakistan’s political system is the
refusal of the party chiefs of the two national-level political parties,
Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), to hold
genuine intra-party elections. How can one champion democracy on a national
level when one refuses to ensure representation within political parties? Because
of this reason, both these political parties have become personality cults and
family fiefdoms rather than representative political parties, as such.
The only mainstream political party which has consistently held
intra-party elections since the 2013 parliamentary elections is the new entrant
in the Pakistani political landscape: Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf
(PTI). Those intra-party elections are far from perfect, but it is a step in
the right direction.
Isn’t it ironic, however, that apart from PTI, the only two
political parties in Pakistan that regularly hold intra-party elections and
that have created a public fund for the election campaign-related expenses are
Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and Jamaat-e-Islami (JI)? No wonder then, the
Urdu-speaking Mohajir nationalists and the hardline Islamists vote in droves
for these political parties, respectively, because they represent the middle
class of a section of Pakistani society.
Had it not been for the racism and militancy of MQM and the
hardline Islamist ideology of JI, both these parties would have easily swept
the elections, in the same way that PTI won an overwhelming mandate in the
provincial elections of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) in 2013 and the general
elections of 2018.
The third principal fault in democracy, not just in Pakistan
but as it is practiced all over the world, is the election campaign funding
part, because individuals and corporations that finance election campaigns
always have ulterior motives: they treat political funding as investments from
which they expect to make profits by influencing executive policy and
legislation.
Nevertheless, in the developed Western societies, a
distinction is generally drawn between power and money. If we take a cursory
look at some of the well-known Western politicians, excluding a few
billionaires like Trump, others like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton,
Tony Blair and Francois Hollande, all of them were successful lawyers from the
middle class backgrounds before they were elected as executives of their
respective countries.
The Republican, Democratic, Conservative and Labor parties,
all of them accept political contributions which are then spent on the election
campaigns of their nominees, which generally are the members of the middle
class. Nowhere in the developed and politically mature Western countries it is
it allowed for individual candidates to spend money from their own pockets on
their election campaigns, because instead of a political contest, it would then
become a contest between the bank accounts of respective candidates.
Although money does influence politics even in the Western
countries, it only happens through indirect means like the election campaign
financing of political parties, congressional lobbying and advocacy groups etc.
In the developing democracies, like India and Pakistan, for instance, only the
so-called “electable” feudals, industrialists and billionaire businessmen can
aspire for political offices due to election campaign-related expenses, and the
middle class and the masses are completely excluded from the whole electoral
exercise.
This makes a sheer mockery of democratic process, because
how can we expect from the ultra-rich elite to protect the interests of the
middle and lower classes? They would obviously enact laws and formulate public
policy which would favor their financial interests without any regard for the
larger public interest.
In Pakistan, politics has become the exclusive monopoly of
the feudal Bhutto fiefdom and the industrialist Sharif dynasty; while in India,
the elitist Nehru dynasty has practically been kicked out of politics by the
Hindu nationalist BJP due to the former’s neoliberal policies and hereditary
leadership.
Fact of the matter is that in Pakistan and India, we have
never had a genuinely representative democracy that would cater to the needs
and interests of the masses. What we have had thus far is quasi-democracy or
more appropriately, an “elitocracy,” that protects the interests of moneyed
elites of the subcontinent.
Nevertheless, democracy evolves over time. Instead of losing faith in political system, one must remain engaged in repetitive electoral process, which delivers in the long run through scientifically proven trial-and-error method.
