PTI’s Foreign Funding Case and Need for Electoral Reforms

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.